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Posted

My 17-year old son needs to learn Python by September.  I am looking for an Online course or instructional lessons that he can follow at his own pace when he wants.  He knows a bit already. What is the best/ most user-friendly course or whatever to follow and can you tell me approximately how many hours it will take?

Posted
49 minutes ago, Lucy the Valiant said:

How well does he need to know it? Is there a test or benchmark he can reverse engineer?

He will start his course in September and they say he should know if « fairly well » which is not much of a benchmark.

Posted

Python.org is the official documentation website. Beyond that, there are lots of good tutorials out there, and he should pick one that makes sense to him. Some people prefer videos of watching people do stuff. Some people pick up books. Some people like structured websites like codecademy or coursera or whatever. In any event, a cheat sheet to refer to has been helpful for most of my kids when they pick up a new language.

step back and let him figure it out and do it….everyone learns their own way, and a college student he needs to figure it out how he learns best, how to find resources, etc.

  • Like 3
Posted
1 hour ago, prairiewindmomma said:

Python.org is the official documentation website. Beyond that, there are lots of good tutorials out there, and he should pick one that makes sense to him. Some people prefer videos of watching people do stuff. Some people pick up books. Some people like structured websites like codecademy or coursera or whatever. In any event, a cheat sheet to refer to has been helpful for most of my kids when they pick up a new language.

step back and let him figure it out and do it….everyone learns their own way, and a college student he needs to figure it out how he learns best, how to find resources, etc.

These are great options.

I'm trying to get dudeling moving.  He said my timing was good as skill lack has been bugging him of late. . . .  good, I hope it bugs him enough to be motivation to do something about it.

  • Like 1
Posted

I liked this series and the stuff from freecodecamp.org. His timeline is tight and these are short. He just needs to find a presenter he clicks with and work his way through the videos. He also needs to do a few personal projects to use the skills and get into it. The thing is to learn enough to start using it for something. I got really into programming an online website for an imaginary food truck at one point. Since it was interesting to me I spent more time on it. 
 

The worst course I did was a paid one. I had access to some paid tutorials through DH’s work and one of them was awful. If you start with something written for people who already know a bunch of computer languages it will be annoying and unhelpful. If your son is a visual learner, and has never done any programming, I think playing with Scratch first is both fun and very helpful with base understanding.  With his timeline he’s going to need to hustle. 

  • Like 2
Posted
1 hour ago, KungFuPanda said:

I liked this series and the stuff from freecodecamp.org. His timeline is tight and these are short. He just needs to find a presenter he clicks with and work his way through the videos. He also needs to do a few personal projects to use the skills and get into it. The thing is to learn enough to start using it for something. I got really into programming an online website for an imaginary food truck at one point. Since it was interesting to me I spent more time on it. 
 

The worst course I did was a paid one. I had access to some paid tutorials through DH’s work and one of them was awful. If you start with something written for people who already know a bunch of computer languages it will be annoying and unhelpful. If your son is a visual learner, and has never done any programming, I think playing with Scratch first is both fun and very helpful with base understanding.  With his timeline he’s going to need to hustle. 

He has used scratch and another program for coding so he is not a complete beginner.  This series looks like a good starting point.

Posted

I'm currently working through the Great Courses course.  I already know a similar language, so I just need it to fill in the details.  It also has general computer science stuff in it that I've never had before, which I'm finding interesting but may be too low level for your student.

  • Like 2
Posted

If it helps, the Harvard CS50 course is free online and it’s nice if you’ve never taken a computer science course before. The lectures are interesting and the class projects will have you dabbling in several languages. It’s the reason I even played with scratch to begin with. 

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