This Practical programming skills in Python teacher’s guide contains detailed lesson plans to accompany the eleven sets of PowerPoint slides, worksheets and practical problems.

The lessons are designed to form a strong base for ideas for the teacher and should be adapted to suit the teaching style and preferences of the individual teacher, and the resources and nature of the individual school or Computing / ICT department.

The material supplied for this unit includes:

• 10 PowerPoint presentations, each designed to cover one lesson
• Worksheets, with answers provided, for the first ten lessons
• 10 homework tasks, each with answers
• 60 sample Python programs and associated text files
• Reference sheet on reading and writing text files in Python
• Reference sheet on list handling in Python
• Five longer exemplar practical problems and Python solutions which recap the skills learned in the unit.

At the end of this Unit, all students should be able to:

• Use basic programming structures of sequence, selection and iteration
• Use a regular expression to validate an input
• Create, manipulate and interrogate lists
• Read from, write to and append simple text files
• Write, test and debug programs to solve simple problems.