I am giving an iSkills Workshop for the Faculty of Information. Over two three-hour sessions, I take absolute beginners to writing a small programs to encrypt, decrypt, and break a Caesar cipher.
I got the idea to teach programming this way from “Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python” from Al Sweigert. Hat tip to you, sir. You can buy the book from Amazon or you can read it for free from his web site.
Since I was teaching a short introductory workshop, my lessons were very streamlined. We didn’t get input from the keyboard or write functions. The solution that I used was similar to the one by Captain Deadbones.
We used the computers in a teaching classroom, so I didn’t have to do any installation or configuration. Without this support, we couldn’t have got as far as we did. Thanks, Tony Lemmens.
Resources
- Material from Lecture 1
- Material from Lecture 2
- Online Python Tutor by Philip Guo
- Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Great Idea. I really wish there was more to the article. maybe turn the Lecture notes into an article?
Thanks for the props, @CPTDEADBONES. The lecture notes are available in the two zip files linked to under “Lecture 1” and “Lecture 2.” Slides, iPython Notebooks, and solutions are all available.