I’ll take this as a shameless opportunity to plug my startup: Pathbird (pathbird.com). Happy to chat more about this if anyone is curious: travis@pathbird.com.

I’ll take this as a shameless opportunity to plug my startup: Pathbird (pathbird.com). Happy to chat more about this if anyone is curious: travis@pathbird.com. I developed it with a professor at UMich to teach a data science course for non-CS grad students. He had a deep belief in tinkering, exploration, and one-step-at-a-time learning. And I’ve seen it work pretty well. Pathbird itself is a platform for instructors to build these kinds of computational, “guided” lessons that emphasize the experience and process of learning. Far too many intro CS/programming lessons read like glossaries. Obviously the syntax of if statements and for loops is important, but starting there on day one encourages students to miss the forest for the trees.