Instructor Recommendations & Pre-Work

Pre-Course Responsibilities

We highly recommend you begin preparing your lessons at least 2-4 weeks before the course starts. A good benchmark is to prepare the first 5 - 6 lessons before the course actually begins.

During these preparation weeks you should:

• Review the high-level unit structure, lesson plans, project arcs, and instructor resources provided.

• Review the objectives as well as sample, starter, and solution code for each lesson, lab, and project.

• Read through our student feedback guide and review the rubrics for each project.

• Decide how you want to incorporate your experiences into lesson materials and deliverables.

• Create / update slide decks to correspond with the materials you plan to teach.

  • We recommend using Reveal.js to automatically generate slides from external markdown files.

• Review these required student onboarding tasks, and ask your producer for access to the pre-course onboarding assessment, which will help you gauge your students' comfort level with introductory concepts.

• Review our course technical requirements.

Note: We recommend that you follow the lesson structure provided as a baseline, but feel free to add or supplement the curriculum with materials based on your experience and students' comfort level. If you'd like to suggest future curriculum revisions, please see our contributing guidelines.

Pre-Work Objectives

When preparing your slide decks and reviewing the curriculum, keep in mind the following pre-work criteria for students:

Task Objectives

Before the first class, students should have already:

• Installed Python (2.7)

• Installed Anaconda

• Created a github account

Learning Objectives

Before the first class, students should be able to:

• Define basic data types used in object-oriented programming

• Recall the Python syntax for lists, dictionaries, and functions

• Create files and navigate directories using the command line interface (for their specific environment)

Preliminary Goals:

After the first week, students will be able to:

1. Utilize unix commands to navigate the file system and modify files

• Summarize a basic filesystem structure, including absolute and relative paths

• Use the most common commands to navigate and modify files / directories via the Terminal window.

2. Write programs that utilize the different data types

• Describe the concept of a "data type" and how it relates to variables

• Identify and define variable with the following data types: int, float, string, boolean, list, and dictionary

• Write code that uses conditional statements to control the flow of a program

• Declare, assign to, and manipulate data stored in a variable

• Iterate over and and manipulate values in an array

3. Write functions that accepts a parameter and solves a problem

• Describe how parameters and arguments relate to functions

• Create and call a function that accepts parameters to solve a problem

• Return a value from a function using the return keyword

• Define and call functions

4. Write for loops that iterate over arrays and loops

• Create arrays and manipulate values in Arrays.

• Describe why arrays are useful and how to use them effectively in Python

• Write a “for” loop

• Describe the difference between for and while statements

Note that students may need to be reminded to complete the pre-work on the first day of class. We've provided modular lesson components during your first flex lesson that you can use to review this material.