About

This repository contains several Jupyter notebooks. These notebooks provide an introduction to programming in Python.

The focus of the material is students with little or no previous programming experience, especially in non-technical courses of study. To support these students in learning the complex skill of programming, the Four Components Instructional Design (4C/ID) method was used to create the material.

The notebooks are organized as in a directory structure in ascending complexity. Each directory contains a notebook explaining the topic as well as howto-notebook that summarises the most important aspects. Furthermore, there is an exercise folder that contains exercises according to the 4C/ID model. In the exercises folder, there is always an index file linking to all the available exercises. As an example consider the topic conditionals. The folder contains the following files:

• conditionals.ipynb: The introduction to the topic (i.e. the lecture)
• conditionals_howto.ipynb: the howto
• exercises: a folder containing all the exercises for the topic
  • 00_conditional_exercises.ipynd: the index file for the exercises.

All the exercises contain unit tests. These tests can be used by the students to check their solutions. The unit tests have been created using nose. Furthermore, all the exercises contain the annotations required by nbgrader.

Todos

• After the first semester teaching whith these notebooks it became clear that some of the exercises require some rework. Currently, the explanation of the task is not always clear enough.
• Translate the notebooks and exercises.

Acknowledgements

The work on this material has been supported by

• The SQSL-Project of the FH Aachen: https://www.fh-aachen.de/en/hochschule/projekt-sqsl/
• The Stifterverband in the context of a Senior-Fellowship für Innovationen in der digitalen Hochschullehre: https://www.stifterverband.org/digital-lehrfellows-nrw/2019/drumm