Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes has organized and will be leading virtual versions of the Python Trainers Summit on April 23 and Python Education Summit on April 24.
Wickes proposed the Trainers Summit event, which was accepted as part of PyCon's Hatchery program. The summit will focus on Python training contexts outside of a formal classroom.
"Being related to education, but not always identifying as educators within their professional role, many trainers are isolated from the broader community of expertise on teaching and learning. This means that they are missing out on key discoveries and practices, and the educator community is missing out on the expertise of teaching adult professional learners," said Wickes.
The Python Education Summit brings together teachers and educators to focus on extending coding literacy, through Python, to a broad audience. Wickes co-chaired this year's eighth annual event, which will be held online.
"The move to virtual is difficult but necessary. Without our community to support and guide us through developing best practices for doing so, we cannot do our jobs well. Educators in this space need each other now more than ever to ensure that our teaching is effective and emotionally healthy for the students as they are coping with the pandemic," she said.
Wickes teaches programming and information technology courses at the iSchool. She serves on the Executive Council of The Carpentries (2018-2020). Wickes was previously a data curation specialist for the Research Data Service at the University of Illinois Library and the curation manager for Wolfram|Alpha in Champaign. She currently co-organizes the Champaign-Urbana Python user group and is a Software Carpentry instructor.