[Events] Wrapping up the 3rd Boston Python Workshop

[Jessica McKellar]

Hi folks,

We ran the 3rd Boston Python Workshop this past Friday and Saturday at
Google Cambridge. Staffers Adam, Asheesh, and Karen took some great
photographs of the event:

http://meetup.bostonpython.com/photos/2348311/

The structure was mostly unchanged from the 2nd run:
- on Friday evening: get your programming environment set up, install
dependencies for the Saturday projects, go through a pretty substantial
self-paced tutorial
- on Saturday: start with a 2 hour interactive lecture
- break for lunch, meet other Pythonistas and the staff
- on Saturday afternoon: rotate through 3 projects: Twitter API, ColorWall,
Wordplay
- end with a quick wrap-up, next steps, exit survey

Our material is all online:

http://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_3

I was pleased to get a number of requests to re-use some of the Workshop
material, in particular the Friday setup and tutorial, via the Geek Feminism
re-post of our Lessons Learned blog post. Our ColorWall project was also
re-used at the Artemis Project, a summer CS program for high school girls:
http://www.bu.edu/lernet/artemis/past/2011/about.html. Awesome!

In preparation for the 3rd run, we got in touch with the maintainer of
http://codingbat.com/ about adding public support for custom Python
exercises, which he added, which is awesome. We then wrote some custom
CodingBat questions that were used to reinforce the material from Friday and
Saturday. Here's a master list of our custom questions:

http://openhatch.org/wiki/CodingBat

Attendees loved CodingBat and the instant feedback, and we're definitely
going to continue using it at the Workshop.

As usual, we invited workshop alums to a follow-up Project Night that we run
monthly with the Boston Python Meetup:

http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/23745451/

We had a bunch of old and new Workshop alums as well as some women from the
waitlist show up, which was great.

Sticking with the trend of running these workshops every 2 months, we plan
on doing a 4th run at MIT in September. We may super-size the event to flush
our huge waitlist.

Let me know if I can answer any questions about the Workshop, and thank you
Workshop staff!

-Jessica
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