Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham earn Community Service Awards

On Friday, July 18th the board of the Python Software Foundation voted to award both Barbara Shaurette and Katie Cunningham a Community Service Award for Q2 2014.

The award is given in recognition of their work to create and run their Young Coders classes, along with freely distributing their teaching materials.

The program began at PyCon 2013 and was an immediate success. The followup blog post is the second most popular post in PyCon's history by a wide margin, and the event was one of the most talked about topics of the conference.

“I don't think you'd ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,” Barbara wrote of the kids’ ability to learn, write, and run code.
Since it's beginnings in Santa Clara it has been run at several other conferences, including again at PyCon 2014 - complete with one day having been taught in French, PyTennessee, and most recently at PyOhio.

We thank Katie and Barbara for their work in actively promoting and teaching Python to a new generation of programmers.