Welcome to Hell Cue the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This is a story that turns out well. But my code got stuck in import hell. I tried to teach my students all about pytest. Instead, for two days, I was sent on a debugging quest. I teach middle school students how to code in python. I reckoned it was time to talk about the datetime module. Students generally love projects that they can connect back to themselves. So I thought a great way to introduce datetime was to have python calculate how many days the…
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Russell Helmstedter
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I have learned a lot over the past 2.5 years of my Python journey. What started out as a hobby during COVID-19 lock downs in 2020, has now become a major component of my professional workload. This article is designed to highlight the importance of the iterative process: write some code -> learn new stuff -> review some code -> refactor. I will share some code I wrote in April and May of 2020 (approximately two months into learning Python), my thought process at the time, how I decided to refactor it, and finally a performance comparison. One crucial factor…
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Automating the Boring Stuff and Plotting Student Data
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12 min readMy name is Russell Helmstedter. I am a middle school math and computer science teacher at De Anza Academy of Technology & the Arts (DATA). My first exposure to Python was in March of 2020. For some reason, I was stuck at home and couldn’t go out and do things. I decided to learn how to code. After googling things like “what coding language should I learn” and “learn how to code”, I found Al Sweigart’s Automate the Boring Stuff. I was hooked. I began learning everything I could about Python. I started listening to podcasts, reading blogs, searching for…