Cape Town, South Africa
Python for Programmers
Nina Schiff
Umonya is an initiative aimed at expanding the availability and accessibility of Computer Science in South Africa. It provides children, who might otherwise not have had the opportunity, to gain exposure and basic experience with programming.This takes the form of a weekend long course, where students are taught the basics of programming through the use of Python.
Umonya is currently managed by Lyndsay Lawrence and Nina Schiff, who both graduated from UCT. Lyndsay is a developer at BrandsEye while Nina works as part of the Amazon EC2 team. Both are passionate about education and believe that there is always something new to learn.
Talk Outline
A tutorial aimed at introducing Python to programmers. The tutorial will cover basic Python concepts, such as datastructures (and their manipulation), functions and classes. The talk will also touch on some more advanced topics, including lambda functions and functional-style programming, Regular Expressions and very basic networking. The tutorial section will be followed by a practical coding session, where participants will be asked to fill in the AI portion for a capture-the-flag, maze-style game.
A brief and speedy introduction to Python programming fundamentals as well as some of the stuff that makes Python a bit magic. The talk is aimed at individuals who already have some programming experience, although not necessarily in Python. The session will finish off with some hands-on exposure to the language through the form of a tournament style capture-the-flag game. Here participants will be required to code some basic movement AI, in order to pit their AI against those of other participants.