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Unschooling and Learning Python

 KO6BTY and I are making another run through Python.

Diaze has learned a bit of Python in the past when she set up our QSO mapping app to pull in pertinent ionosonde data from the Digisonde ionosondes. Now, we're working with Python again to analyze data not from ground-bound ionosondes, but from the COSMIC2 constellation of satellits that provide ionospheric data includihng electron density profiles.

That was the intro, and the application, but this post is more about how to informallly teach Python. What will work, and what won't? With unschooling, a lot of learning is initiated by something called strewing. Strewing as it's comonly defiined is, essentially, keeping things a little cluttered around the house. It's leaving reading material, projects, web sites, and so on, out where everyone in the house, including and especially the kids, can see them. I've widened the definition to include our entire indoor and outdoor lives, and the city and world at large. For us, it works in more ways than one.

But, it's a very informal activity designed to lead, perhaps, to more formal educational activities depending on the kid's interests. Here's the question: can a topic also be taught informally? I've had varying results with this. Sometimes the kids here pick up things hanging out with my partner and I. Diaze picked up writing by attending writing groups with me. Mota, who's manual dexterity is through the roof, picks up physical activitiese by hanging out with other people doing them as evidenced by me getting nailed in the chest by a perfect spiral football pass when he was six. Tawnse has picked up and lost physics more than once just soaking it in from my partner's online lecture productions.

I enjoy showing the gang how to do things but, especially for me, and especially with Python, there can be a lot of unexpected set up that can start to slow progress and sometimes drive everything to a halt. Last night, it was working in a venv vs not workign in a venv on a Chromebook with respect to installing packages with pip.

I, of course, have setup my Chromebook at sometime in the past to let me do pretty much whatever the heck I please. I don't remember how I did it. Meanwhile, Diaze's Chromebook was adamant that she not install netCDF4 with pip as it might ruin the entire Python install.

I'm happy to report that we did arrive at the venv solution mostly through our experience with Datasette plugins. The development section of most plugins mentions using venv. That did the trick. Once Diaze was within a virtual environment, pip felt comfortable enough to allow the install.

We stopped there for the day.

I'm going to try to keep a lab notebook of how this goes. I caught Covid this week, which  might seem irrelevant, but Diaze and I are doing all of this work through Google Meet so I  don't expose her. Consequently, I have our entire chat streams as a result. I'm going to see if I can somehow weave those in as data for how to improve or change or show what works about this 'teaching/learning' method.

It outghta be fun.


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