How is teaching young students Python changing with the advent of LLMs? This week on the show, Kelly Schuster-Paredes from the Teaching Python podcast joins us to discuss coding and AI in the classroom.

Kelly shares her current thoughts on teaching Python to young students. She stresses that the earliest classes still need to cover the fundamentals. We also discuss how coding instruction is evolving toward reading and reviewing code more than writing it.

Course Spotlight: Building a Python GUI Application With Tkinter

In this video course, you’ll learn the basics of GUI programming with Tkinter, the de facto Python GUI framework. Master GUI programming concepts such as widgets, geometry managers, and event handlers. Then, put it all together by building two applications: a temperature converter and a text editor.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:28 – Starting to use AI in the classroom
00:05:17 – How did students react to using NLP and NLTK?
00:06:40 – Teaching Python beginners now
00:12:31 – Code editor changes with LLM features
00:15:25 – Less in-classroom teaching
00:16:22 – What sparks interest in coding for students?
00:21:14 – Video Course Spotlight
00:22:44 – Exploratory robotics
00:25:56 – Do you need to struggle to learn?
00:32:52 – Working through frustration and the tendency not to read
00:36:37 – Mixed feelings on the changes to teaching
00:41:19 – Teaching through reading and code reviewing
00:45:33 – Lower-level classes are still about fundamentals
00:47:47 – Other areas of teaching using AI tools
00:51:29 – Improving prompting skills
00:54:22 – Using these tools to organize creativity
00:54:53 – What AI tools are working for you?
00:57:13 – Sharing knowledge and techniques with other teachers
01:00:02 – General advice for teachers
01:02:03 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:02:52 – What do you want to learn next?
01:03:46 – How can people follow your work online?
01:04:10 – Thanks and goodbye

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