Is there someone in your life you’d like to inspire to learn Python? Mission Encodeable is a website designed to teach people to code, built by two high-school students. This week on the show, Anna and Harry Wake talk about creating their site and motivating people to start coding.

We discuss why they decided to build the site. Anna and Harry initially felt that the site would be for other students but soon realized it could be helpful for anyone interested in starting to code in Python. We cover the project-based approach and how they implemented the interactive browser-based tool replit.com.

We talk about learning Python in the classroom and how they found additional books and tutorials to supplement their coding education. Anna and Harry also created a resource hub to help teachers take advantage of the site.

Course Spotlight: Rock, Paper, Scissors With Python: A Command Line Game

In this course, you’ll learn to program rock paper scissors in Python from scratch. You’ll learn how to take in user input, make the computer choose a random action, determine a winner, and split your code into functions.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:17 – Personal backgrounds
00:02:51 – What’s the goal for the site?
00:03:54 – How did you come up with the idea?
00:05:08 – Where have you shared it?
00:06:39 – Projects for each level
00:09:28 – How has the response been?
00:10:10 – Using replit
00:12:56 – Sponsor: CData Software
00:13:37 – Design of the site and other tools to create it
00:15:49 – Learning Python and classes at school
00:17:41 – Did remote school inspire more online exploration?
00:19:16 – Myths of how kids learn programming
00:23:32 – More about projects
00:27:57 – Video Course Spotlight
00:29:27 – What other areas of Python do you want to explore?
00:33:08 – Teachers using the site
00:37:11 – What other resources have you used to learn Python?
00:38:52 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
00:40:01 – What do you want to learn next?
00:42:06 – Thanks and goodbye

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