Wrapping up the Cruft - Making Wrappers to Hide Complexity
Part of the Education specialist track
When working with students, the goal is to teach them how to think about systems, logic, and problem solving, not just rote memorisation, or copying boilerplate code from an example.
This talk is about how writing wrappers around the cruft can help you present your students with an approachable interface to make learning to program easy, fun, and effective.
See this talk and many more by getting your ticket to PyCon AU now!
I want a ticket!This year and last, we have been working with the Kookaberries, microcomputers produced by the AustSTEM Foundation.
We’ve used these with great success to teach students of a wide variety of ages.
To facilitate this, we’ve implemented wrappers around various peripherals, components, and pre-existing libraries. These standardise and simplify the code that the students need to write, so they can solve larger and more interesting problems, and get more excited about the possibilities.
In this talk, I'll go through what this entails, what the wrappers look like, and what this has enabled our students to do, creating projects far larger and more exciting than previously possible.
As CTO of ConnectEd Code, I’ve focused on making tech accessible and approachable to students, while still giving them the power to solve interesting problems and create fun solutions.
I’ve been using Python for years, working in both the professional and education sectors, and have focussed on being coding to everyone.