Canterbury programming workshop

I've just attended Canterbury University's three day workshop 'Learn Programming with the Department of Fun".  What a way to start a new decade!  Over 40 teachers, primary and secondary attended from around the country.   Professor Tim Bell and his Kia Takatū team delivered a fun and engaging three days that was a crash course into the fundamentals of computer programming.

1. Input
2. Output
3. Sequence
4. Selection 
5. Iteration 
6. Variable

We were split into two groups those who wanted to learn programming using Scratch and those who wanted to learn using Python. Having worked with Scratch for a number of years now I chose Python, something I've been wanting to get my head around for a while. I was anticipating it being quite a mental stretch for me but it was really a lot of fun. Although it was a crash course intensive, Dr Caitlin Duncan, our tutor, was great and explained everything in a very logical manner.
I learned more about variables, strings, operations, booleans, functions, conditionals and for loops.

Something that particularly struck a cord with me was how I could think about bringing in more focus when teaching programming for solving a problem rather than perhaps showing how to code something to move 4 steps for example. While knowing how to move a sprite around the stage in Scratch or change backgrounds etc.. is a useful thing to know what might make students' learning more purposeful is to first pose a problem for them to solve. Problems that directly align to the Design and Developing Digital Outcomes.
The thing I like about programming is that it's like solving a puzzle, frustrating as that may be sometimes.

With all the wonderful learning over the past three days, I'm very mindful that if I don't keep it up I'll loose it, so I've given myself a challenge to try and complete one Python task a day. Here's today's code, how to ask users for a specific number in this case their age.