About

Goal

The PyStar program is workshop designed to teach women (including trans women) and their friends who are looking to learn how to program in a friendly non-alpha-geek environment. The goal is to increase the number of women programming, especially in Python which is a very approachable language to get started with.

Pedagogy

The approach for this workshop is to have groups learning together with at least one guide or instructor who can lead where needed, and help out as requested while participants work through the tutorials. There are several “badges” a learner can earn by learning to do various programming tasks. The badges have various levels of difficulty and the goal is to have modules that meet the learner where they are at.

Future

As these workshops begin to happen it is hoped that attendees will come back as teaching assistants and eventually teach future workshops with the end goal of having former participants become the organizers for future workshops. There may be a disproportionate number of male teachers at initial workshops which is why we’re encouraging participants to come back and take the lead as soon as they feel ready.

Planning

If you’re interested in organizing a workshop, working on the modules, or other discussions about teaching Python & programming to women, please join our Google group http://groups.google.com/group/pystar

Contribute

You may have noticed our “Fork me on GitHub” banner - please do it! We would love for you to contribute badges/modules/typos corrections - anything to help make this as engaging and useful as a distributed workshop planning site can be.