High School Students Program Robots with Python

Vern Ceder's Canterbury High School students are learning to program in Python by making robots play music, find objects in the room, and perform other challenging tasks. The local paper, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, wrote a story about the class earlier this month, and Vern blogs about how he arranged that on the Learn Python blog for the benefit of other members of the community with similar projects.

Congratulations to the students at Canterbury High, and keep up the good work!

For more information about how you can use Python in educational settings, join the edu-sig mailing list.

Summer pyGames

Their motto is "Learning should be fun", and with Python and PyGame, it sure is. The Summer pyGames project, organized by Elizabeth Barndollar of BAE Systems, Travis Axtel of SPAWAR, and Zenko Klapko of the Charleston Linux Users Group, is a six-week long competition during which high school students develop open-source educational software and games to be used and distributed to 3000 schools in South Carolina.

According to Elizabeth Barndollar, in two years the project has grown from seven students to include seven teams in SC, FL, NJ, VA and Canada. The Summer pyGames is helping to inspire students, teach them the value of open-source software, and (even better) learn Python. in the first two editions, XO laptops and netbooks were distributed to the wining teams. This year the organizers are planning to have even more great prizes.

Registration to the 2011 contest is on "Pi day", 03/14/2011. All students are challenged to participate and create games that make Math, Language and Science fun.

To learn more about the Summer pyGames project please visit their website.

UPDATE: Recently, the PSF awarded a US$ 1,000 grant to help in the organization of the upcoming edition.

PSF supports 2010 SciPy India

-->

The Python Software Foundation has awarded a USD $1250 grant to help fund sprints at the 2010 SciPy India Conference, being held in Hyderabad between December 13th and 18th. The conference consists of two days of talks, three days of a combination of morning tutorials and afternoon coding sprints, as well as an additional full day of sprints. The conference focuses heavily on tutorials and coding sprint, as the adoption of Python for scientific programming is not as wide-spread in India as it is in the US and Europe.

Since the Scipy India Conference targets students and faculty, it is essential that costs are kept as low as possible for attendees. To that end, most of the conference costs are covered by FOSSEE (Free and Open-source Software for Science and Engineering Education). PSF support will help in the overall organization, especially now that the conference more than doubled in size this year.

Python Jobs Board Maintainer Changing

The Python Job Board has been maintained for over 4 years primarily by one person: Martin Thomas. Recently, Martin has decided to pass the reins to Chris Withers. The PSF would like to thank Martin for his hard work and wish him well on his new endeavors. We would also like to welcome Chris to his new position an d applaud him for taking up this new responsibility.

Don't Know About the Job Board?

Some members of the community may not be aware of the Python Job Board, a free list of open positions using Python and related tools. You'll find career opportunities working with Django, Plone, SQLAlchemy, CSS, HTML, Database Administration, and much more. Although the jobs are in a variety of industries, and located all over the world, the common thread that ties them all together is Python.

For more information, see the website.