My brother in law, Nimrod de Wit, came to Arba Minch to live and work with us for some months. He has quite some experience with Python. Based on this experience, our visitor offered a training on Basic Python for Environmental Data Processing to my colleagues of the Arba Minch Water Technology Institute. 31 persons attended one or more training sessions. 17 persons received certificates for attending all sessions and submitting an assignment in which they used Python for their own data.
I have offered a Python training to AWTI staff already multiple times (march 2021, june 2021, october 2021 and october 2022). Nimrod fully revised those materials. My trainings leaned heavily on Powerpoint slides and simultaneous small practice tasks in the Spyder IDE. Nimrod shifted to small (30 minute) introductions, after which participants could work by themselves through Juypter Notebooks. The training materials are on my GitHub repository.
I was glad to be the assistant rather than the trainer during a training for once. I am very glad for the revised training materials, which force the participants to practice much more. A training might help people to get started, but skills in something like programming are ultimately from a lot of hours of simply trying and using it.
