Spreading the Adoption of Python in India: the FOSSEE Python Project
Prabhu Ramachandran
Video: https://youtu.be/6UnuPhTPdnM
Abstract
The FOSSEE (Free Open Source Software for Science and Engineering
Education) project (http://fossee.in) is funded by the Ministry of Human
Resources and Development, MHRD, (http://mhrd.gov.in) of the Government of
India. The FOSSEE project is based out of IIT Bombay and the goal of the
project is to eliminate the use of proprietary tools in the college
curriculum. FOSSEE promotes various open source packages. Python is one
of them.
In this paper, the Python-related activities and initiatives of FOSSEE are
discussed. The group focuses on promoting the use of Python in the
college curriculum. The important activities of this group include the
creation of spoken-tutorials on Python, the creation of 400+ IPython-based
textbook companions, an online testing tool for a variety of programming
languages, a course akin to software carpentry at IIT Bombay, the
organization of the SciPy India conference, and finally spreading the
adoption of Python in schools and colleges. The paper discusses how these
tools may be used to teach Python in the context of collegiate education
and computational science.
DOI
10.25080/Majora-629e541a-010