nys

nys

@nys

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30-ish, definitely not a personality construct running on an android. nope.
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nys
@nys

does anyone have good zero to functional courses for learning python WITHOUT MATH??

i have a friend who is learning python with the focus of going into a more technical focused IT position so they want to have scripting abilities and automation (they applied for the new cohost role even though they probably aren't there yet (but its super cool they did))

HOWEVER. every common book/class/etc that claims to start at basics includes some level of algebra or college math or just math in general (exponents, square root) that is presented in a "well obviously you know what [concept] is" and not only is it demotivating (makes them feel stupid for not knowing it :host-cry:) but it also means they spent 90% of their time learning the math concept to learn a simple python concept that they understood quickly.

i had another acquaintance who ran into this same issue that really discouraged them.

y'all are a bunch of dope eggbugs :host-love: so i figure one of you have come across some kind of intro to python but very much intro to python so you can build small apps that interact with APIs and not intro to python so you can pass one of those bullshit esoteric coding interviews that involve like fibonacci or something.

i am holding myself back from the rant because i am seeking insight and don't want to derail it but this assumption about basic math skills is littered everywhere i used to learn and was just invisible to me. its so frustrating to see this really smart people get laid low by spotty education or just dyscalculia.

we did come up with an idea for a project that they could work on and i did a quick little intro to dictionaries and they picked it up super fast so the talent is there and hopefully that gives them a goal to work towards (and apply the things they are learning) that isn't related to the fucking quizzes this class uses bc the quizzes are all math based.

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in reply to @nys's post:

lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

hmmmm that depends on what you're counting as "college math" because a lot of stuff does tend to assume that you know what an integer is

but also i feel like it would take about five minutes to clear up gaps like that if they wanted to talk to like, a person

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nys
@nys

as a note this is from an united states perspective, also this is a passion of mine so this energy is directed at the failings of our school system and how those inequalities have a knock on effect and not you :3

i updated it to be clearer cause it's not really about things that are programming concepts like integers, they get those because they are explained clearly. rather its having a function or for loop explained or tested by asking them to do some relatively "simple" math like algebraic functions or exponents. this adds another motivational barrier (that all the people i saw go through this worked through) and they end up having to spend time learning what those things are just to understand the language of the word problem. its an unnecessary additional barrier for someone taking a class about using python to automate IT tasks. you don't need to know binary and hex to do any of the work I do at my very well paid job. heck i barely use math at all.

maybe how i would put it is arbitrary math word problems is not a good way to judge how much some one has learned a programming concept.

in all of these cases the people self learning are already working full time/overtime customer service facing jobs to make ends meet and don't have a ton of energy or time to begin with. i just would prefer they don't have to spend extra energy or feel discouraged because even though they know the concept being taught (a for loop in this example which only needs addition to actually understand) they have to learn an entirely unrelated set of concepts just to do the exercise/quiz. rather than say "print the first 5 elements of this list" its some question about the slope of a line and printing the coords of each point. which sounds simple but for someone who briefly had a shitty math class briefly go over it 6 years ago, its a whole new unrelated concept to learn.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i'm skimming the official python tutorial and noticing a lot of overlap with the specific things you are mentioning haha

i'm guessing this happens because a full introduction to a language needs a lot of short quick examples, ideally meaningful ones, and if you have to introduce a problem and data set for every single one then they become a lot less short and quick. math provides a standard data set (numbers) and a lot of little problems without much fuss

unless you haven't seen the problems before, of course.

(i agree that american math education is a mess, and in fact i think it's a shame that the popular conception of "math" is just about numbers and formulas when it's really about problem-solving with a limited toolset, exactly the same way as programming—)

i don't know how much consolation it is, but at least in what i've seen in the python tutorial so far, the math concepts are largely irrelevant. like they have an example that produces fibonacci numbers... but it's an example of defining a function, so it doesn't really matter what fibonacci numbers are. it ~does something with numbers~ up to some limit, and the main idea is that "some limit" is a thing you can specify without changing the code.

on the other hand the python tutorial is also a bit of a firehose and may not be ideal for a total beginner. i think the intended audience is someone with at least a bit of programming experience.

there used to be a "learn python the hard way" that was popular, and at least relatively straightforward iirc, but its author revealed himself to be kind of a blowhard and it doesn't seem to be free online any more.

i know i've recommended "how to think like a computer scientist" before, but it doesn't seem to have been updated for python 3, and reading over it now it's a bit... stodgy. it is definitely written by a computer scientist. like it tells you what "parsing" means before it shows you any code and that feels a bit heavy on the front matter.

the only other thing i know is the w3schools tutorial which does stuff that makes me wince from literally page 1

probably the best i can suggest is to pick something (ideally something reliable, so maybe even just the official tutorial), but also find a group of friendly people who already know python, so they can feel comfortable asking even seemingly trivial questions and get quick answers back from a person.

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nys
@nys

yeah thats basically what they ran into with this course they are taking (it the Google IT Automation one) which is kind of a bummer because the Google IT one is mercifully lacking any of that kind of behavior, so clearly was developed by a different lead.

thanks for looking into it! i've settled on just giving them the slight tutoring while they do self guided programming to build out a little app that does something they are passionate about (in this case looking up kanji by strokes) which has a lot of room to grow and concepts to use. luckily we talked because now they aren't gonna place as much value on doing the end of section quizzes if they would require more math focus.

it is surprising that there aren't more "learn python via interacting with APIs" style classes that don't suffer from the w3schools problem of being somehow worse than just searching the heading on stack overflow >.<

i'll probably just keep flexing my cs tutoring and education skills to help them with core concepts but now i itch to create something simple that just gets people interacting with APIs and processing JSON.

as a side note, the friend in question literally has to look at JSON for their job to find errors in it when supplier submit JSON that has issues and my brain melted when I heard that.

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