DTCC Star Coders Host a Session on Python

On Wednesday February 24th, DTCC Star Coders hosted their second quarterly mob programming session. It was a lot of fun for all involved!

Star Coders is part of the DTCC Rising Stars Program, which seeks to provide learning and coaching opportunities to the graduates of DTCC’s CSR programs. Our participants are high school and college students from all different backgrounds and with a variety of interests, but they all have one thing in common: they want to learn more about technology!

After many of our students expressed an interest in learning more about Python, an amazing group of DTCC volunteers from across the organization worked for months to deliver an interactive and engaging program aimed at introducing students to coding.

At the start of Wednesday’s session Abhay Vaswani and Joel Tucker, our Python gurus, taught all of us the basics of the Python language. We had a great discussion about what makes Python unique and we shared resources for learning more on our own time. Then participants were partnered with DTCC coaches to use their new Python skills to build a Movie Picker tool to help users decide what to watch on Netflix. Students had the opportunity to practice reading code, define requirements, debug, and participate in mob programming (Mob programming operates on the principle that two heads are better than one, and a whole squad is even better than that. It’s just a group of coders working together on a problem to solve it faster and in the best way possible.) It was an awesome way to show how coding can solve everyday challenges, and the coaches learned a lot too!

We finished off the session with a fun Python trivia game to see how much we had learned. We also made plans to meet again in May. Our participants had tons of suggestions for topics for next time, from JavaScript frameworks to mobile application development!

DTCC Star Coders sessions are held quarterly, and we thank all of our volunteers who are passionate about technology! Special thanks to Dana Atherton, September Hamel, Swapna Satchidanandam, Hannah Leleux and Jessica Spencer.