Had a great time at PyTennessee 2014. Participating in the Sprints was great. Being able to help programmers new to Django or new to contributing to open source was very rewarding.
Katie had mentioned a link in her lighting-talk to a Github repo with the curriculum for running a class. But I don't remember nor am unable to find it right now. However, I think that would be a very doable thing to do at my kid's school one Saturday.
The combination of Jessica's talk and Katie's light-talk report, provided lots of concrete ideas for taking action.
I have thought for years now that schools should be teaching programming as young as elementary the way my generation learned typing. It was a standard thing.
Even if kids are not going to be programmers, understanding the basics of development will serve them well.
Jessica McKellar's final keynote:
Slides from my @PyTennessee keynote on CS ed. & teaching the next generation of Python programmers: http://t.co/Kgo68Oemdn #PyTN2014
— Jessica McKellar (@jessicamckellar) February 23, 2014
As well as Katie Cunningham teaching a young coders class ALL DAY, made for what I hope to see more off at programming conferences.
The final talk/keynote of the the conference, I thought was fantastic and completed a nice theme in this conference which was the involvement of children who want to learn to code.
There was a healthy interest in Pinax and Eldarion open source and got some great contributions on biblion, kaleo, and anafero.
In addition, was able to introduction the pinax-starter-app, pinax-project-blog, and in general the concept of Pinax as a whole to a number of folks.
Wow. That was a fantastic conference. Very proud that this was in my city. I was too buys chatting with the attendees to spend time live "ThoughtStreaming".
Very active sprints for the initial night! Lots of Pinax activity.
Looking forward to picking up Michael Trier and having a pre-sprint dinner before meeting up with folks at Emma.
While I can't attend PyTennessee 2014 myself, I'm thrilled that Eldarion is a sponsor and helping run the sprints.
Just getting things started here so I can post my thoughts during this conference. I'll likely create child streams for the Sprints and different talks that I attend.