One of the skills I feel like I've been missing in my life is programming. The only excuse I've had for not learning how to do it is laziness and the fact that it takes time. I'm the kind of guy who ends up dropping things because it takes me more than three hours to master it.
I recently got a bit of a kick in the ass though. Next year the school where I work will be offering programming as a subject that students can choose to take. I was asked to teach this course because I'm the most qualified teacher to do it due to having used some block-programming alongside Micro:Bit in some of my classes.
The curriculum says that the students shall work with several programming languages where at least one is text based. Therefore I've started to learn Python seeing as it seems to be a decent entry point into programming. If I end up teaching this subject over several years I'll probably expanding my repertoire as I go.
There's just about a million ways to learn Python apparently so I decided to go with something called Sololearn. What I liked about this is that it's an app on my phone where I can take on short 5 minute lessons when it pleases me. Perfect for the commute to and from work for instance.
If it's the best way to learn coding or not I'm not sure but for now it's working well. I started their Python for Beginners which has 36 lessons to get me started. So for I've gone through about 20 on them and I'm having fun while doing so. Already being relatively good at math really helps which means I can focus less on the math part of programming and more on the actual syntax.
So far I've pretty much just learned the stuff you see above. How to print text, take inputs, variables, using if/else statements. I already knew how variables and if/else statements works from using Micro:Bit so again this was more about learning the syntax of Python for me.
I'll be moving into loops in my next few lessons which is another thing I've used with Micro:Bit although I expect this to be a wee bit different. So far there hasn't been much of a challenge but I expect that to ramp up as I go. The few times I've answered a task wrong was mostly due to misclicks. If this was brand new mumbo jumbo to me I would probably have lost more lives and had to spend money on Sololearn which I don't really want to do.
I do like Sololearn pretty well though I have to say. The way they're teaching is easy to follow and easy to do. It's heavily based on learning by doing which is definitely what works best for me. The lessons deliver a good mix og multiple choice questions, "finish this code" exercises, predicting what codes to as well as making full codes yourself.
Their subscription as $50/year isn't that bad and you only really need it if you're in a big rush to learn seeing as every mistak you do costs a life which you have three of until they recharge. A subscription gives you infinite lives. There's also some other perks that I don't find necessary personally.
If anyone has any good tips on courses I can take after this beginners course I would love to hear it. My plan was to jump on Sololearns Python Core course after this one but if someone has a better suggestions then drop me a comment!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.