After a much needed relaxation in Mexico over reading break, Lyndsay and I were ready to jump into our project. Python is widely versatile and expansive, so we did not find a linear, rigid learning approach to be appropriate. Instead, Lyndsay and I are going to try to implement as many learning methods as possible to experiment and find wat’s right for us.
For our first session, we familiarized ourselves with the resource W3Schools, a free educational website with various tutorials. We worked through 5-7 tutorials, each time gaining a new basic Python skill. We first worked through the introductory tutorials, learning the fundamental commands, before moving on to some more specific tutorials. We learned how to work around Python syntax, we learned how to make comments, and we learned how to assign variables and what the basic variable types were. We also are now able to make mathematical commands, which we supplemented a more exhaustive list of commands using ChatGPT, and we also learned about the different data types, such as float and string data.
Goals for Our Next Session
For our next session, we are aiming to complete a small project. Lyndsay and I have decided to either create an interactive quiz to showcase our conceptual understanding thus far, or possibly to create a functional budget tracker. Although functionally it is likely to be relatively frivolous, we find it important for our learning progress to have a tangible milestone such as something like this, and we think it will be a fun way to make the learning process more engaging and challenging.