Ingrassellino - Python projects for kids unleash Python and take your small readers on an adventurous ride through the world of programming

Jessica Ingrassellino is a multi-talented educator, business leader, and technologist. She received her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University for music education with an emphasis on assessment.

Jessica is currently employed as the lead software engineer in testing at Bitly, New York City. She transitioned from a teaching career of 10 years to a technology career through a balance of freelance work and social media exposure. Jessica's current work focuses on using Python to develop automated testing tools. She is an ASTQB certified quality assurance engineer with experience in testing web, mobile, and backend applications.

In addition to working at Bitly, Jessica remains committed to education and has founded http://www.teachcode.org/, a nonprofit that teaches computer programming skills to teachers and students in urban or underserved populations through Python and 2D game programming. This new initiative will give teachers the support they need through a standards-referenced curriculum, student-engaging activities, and access to experts in the field of technology.

I would like to thank my students for allowing me to have such fun teaching them Python and learning from their experiences as new programmers. I would also like to thank Cathy Kross and Alice McGowan for being willing to have me in their classes and school and interrupting their daily lives with my code-teaching experiments. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Nick, for believing in me and helping me through some major writer's block. He never loses faith in me, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

David Whale is a software developer who lives in Essex, UK. He started coding as a schoolboy aged 11, inspired by his school's science technician to build his own computer from a kit. These early experiments lead to some of his code being used in a saleable educational word game when he was only 13.

David has been developing software professionally ever since, mainly writing embedded software that provides intelligence inside electronic products, including automated machinery, electric cars, mobile phones, energy meters, and wireless doorbells.

These days, David runs his own software consultancy called Thinking Binaries, and he spends about half of his time helping customers design software for new electronic products, many of which use Python. The rest of the time, he volunteers for The Institution of Engineering and Technology, running training courses for teachers, designing and running workshops and clubs for school children, running workshops and talks at meet-up events all round the UK, and generally being busy with his Raspberry Pi, BBC micro:bit, and Arduino.

David was the technical editor of Adventures in Raspberry Pi, John Wiley & Sons , the coauthor of Adventures in Minecraft , and he is a regular reviewer and editor of technical books for a number of book publishers.

I was really pleased to be asked to review this exciting new coding book for children. Python is an excellent language for children to learn from a young age, and Jessica has done a great job at helping readers take their first few steps in coding with Python. I hope you will be inspired by the code and ideas in this book and come up with your own ideas to enhance and develop all of the programs furtherthis is just the start of your exciting new creative journey into coding with Python!

As you can guess from the title, this book is designed to teach the basic concepts of Python to kids. This book uses several mini projects so that kids can learn how to solve problems using Python.

Python has grown to become a very popular language for programming web apps, analyzing data, and teaching people how to write code. Python is known for being a simple language to use because it is read much like natural languages, yet it is able to do data analysis very quickly, making it a great language to create websites that handle a lot of data. Another nice thing about Python that makes it fun to use is that people have been working on game libraries, such as pygame, so that people can create graphics programs with Python. The use of simple graphics to make short games is a fun way to learn programming constructs and is especially good for visual learners.