EuroPython 2015 Keynote: Carrie Anne Philbin

Marc-Andre Lemburg -

We are pleased to introduce our next keynote speaker for EuroPython 2015: Carrie Anne Philbin. She will be giving her keynote on Thursday, July 23, to start the EuroPython Educational Summit.


About Carrie Anne Philbin

Carrie Anne is leading the education mission for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but is also known as an award winning secondary Computing & ICT Teacher, Author, YouTuber:

  • Author of “Adventures in Raspberry Pi”, a computing book for teenagers wanting to get started with Raspberry Pi and programming. Winner of Teach Secondary magazine’s Technology & Innovation Best Author award 2014.
  • Creator of a YouTube video series for teenage girls called “The Geek Gurl Diaries“, which has won a Talk Talk Digital Hero Award. The episodes include interviews with women working in technology and hands on computer science based tutorials.
  • Vice chair of the Computing At Schools (CAS) initiative to get more girls and minority groups into computing, which created a workshop based hack day for teenagers concentrating on delivering good content to include all and ‘Hack the Curric’ bringing academics, educators and industry experts together to create inclusive resources for the new Computing curriculum.

In 2012, she became a Google Certified Teacher and KS3 ICT subject Leader at a school in East London. She has a blended and open approach to teaching as can be seen on her website ICT with Miss P. She became a Skype Moment Maker and ambassador for technology. She is an evangelist and often speaks at conferences like BETT, Raspberry Jamboree, YRS, PyCon UK and now EuroPython.

The Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution

The problem of introducing children to programming and computer science has seen growing attention in the past few years. Initiatives like Raspberry Pi, Code Club, code.org, (and many more) have been created to help solve this problem. With the introduction of a national computing curriculum in the UK, teachers have been searching for a text based programming language to help teach computational thinking as a follow on from visual languages like Scratch.

The educational community has been served well by Python, benefiting from its straight-forward syntax, large selection of libraries, and supportive community. Education-focused summits are now a major part of most major Python Conferences. Assistance in terms of documentation and training is invaluable, but perhaps there are technical means of improving the experience of those using Python in education. Clearly the needs of teachers and their students are different to those of the seasoned programmer. Children are unlikely to come to their teachers with frustrations about the Global Interpreter Lock! But issues such as usability of IDEs or comprehensibility of error messages are of utmost
importance.

In this keynote, Carrie Anne will discuss existing barriers to Python becoming the premier language of choice for teaching computer science, and how learning Python could be helped immensely through tooling and further support from the Python developer community.

EuroPython Educational Summit

We will have Educational Summit focused talks, trainings, birds of a feather sessions to debate and also Educational Sprints for the building of education focused projects during the weekend.

EuroPython 2015 Educational Summit

Please see the summit announcement for more details.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team