Preferred Partner Highlight: Pythonroom
The Vision
Our vision has always been to provide students with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to succeed in our tech-oriented world. Our team has been teaching computer science to K-12 students for a combined 20 years. We initially taught individual classes at our hacker space in Saratoga, CA, but soon began to wonder how we could reach more students. Hence, we decided to make Pythonroom. After speaking with many educators, we learned about the pain points of bringing coding to the classroom and decided to tackle this problem through technology. We therefore created Pythonroom to make it possible for teachers of any background to start a coding class, regardless of prior programming experience.
We are proud to announce that over 100,000 students globally use Pythonroom to learn computer science. We love to stay in contact with the teachers using our platform and constantly use their feedback to better the platform. We hope to eventually provide all students with the opportunity to learn CS, and provide all teachers with the means to deliver CS curriculum to their students.
The Team
In his free time, Abhinav is either on the golf course, practicing kung fu, or learning a new language. He plans to visit every country and continent and learn 10 languages
Keshav likes to spend his free time riding longboards, eating fruit, and exploring new places. He enjoys working on education tools and contributing to the open-source community.
During his spare time, Rohan loves to hike, indulge in Thai food and an good conversation, as well as make gutsy fantasy football roster decisions. He graduated from UCSD and plans to move back one day.
The Testimonial
We reached out to Kevin Olson, a teacher at Charter School of Morgan Hill in California, and asked him about his experience using Pythonroom in his class.
How did you learn about Pythonroom? I heard about Pythonroom at Picademy. Abhinav and Keshav came and spoke about their approach to teaching computer science. They emphasized their problem-based approach and demoed their product, and I was immediately interested. Their curriculum is built into the platform, and the Projector is a very Google Docs-like implementation that lets me share code with the whole class in real-time. When they also showed how to setup Pythonroom to run your Python code remotely on a Raspberry Pi, I knew I had to try it out!
How do you utilize Pythonroom in your classroom? What are the benefits? I use Pythonroom as the development environment and instructional vehicle for my lessons. I'll pick a section of the Learn Python curriculum, do some pre-teaching whole class to introduce the concepts they'll see online, and then have students get started. I move around the room as students work to help them out, but I always wander back to my computer to monitor whole-class progress with the intuitive dashboard.
Once students have finished the lesson, I'll interrupt the class to describe and assign an application project. For example, our most recent project has been a Mad Libs program. Students saw a small sample built into the curriculum, but we're expanding on the project to create more engaging stories, adding more variables for students to use in the story, and integrating the input() function to make the mad libs user-customizable.
What would you say to another teacher who may be hesitant about trying a new #edtech product in their classroom? To another teacher hesitant about jumping on board with an edtech product, I'd encourage them to try it out on their own first. Introducing a new platform can be scary when you're not sure what kinds of problems students will encounter, so seeing the screens and interface yourself beforehand can make everything easier. Also, I'd argue that the benefits of most edtech products, Pythonroom included, far outweigh any fears or anxiety about using them with your students. How else could you easily monitor student progress, view students' code, and deploy an online curriculum? There's a certain amount of "just jump in and take a risk!" that must be considered; after all, it's what we ask our students to do all the time! We should be able to do the same.
If you have any questions, email us at info@pledgecents.com.
