Mechatronic Systems and Control, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2018
TEACHING METHOD REFORM OF
PYTHON LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING
COURSE BASED ON MINIMUM
KNOWLEDGE SETS
Xiaoyan Kui
∗
, Weiguo Liu
∗
, Kehua Guo
∗
, Jiazhi Xia
∗
, and Huakun Du
∗∗
Abstract
Reform of teaching content, teaching methods, and evaluation of
examination system is an urgent issue of current teaching reform in
higher education. Python language is released under the background
of calculating ecology, which is concise, clear, elegant, and easy to
learn. There are more than thousands of third-party programming
libraries. Rich resources of an open community also incur new
problem, much information will consume large amounts of atten-
tion. How to make students absorb more knowledge and master
more skills in the limited class time? Also, it is important for
teachers to think about how to improve the efficiency of information
cognition. The paper puts forward a teaching method of Python
language based on minimum knowledge sets, combining with the
characteristics of different major students; the method can not only
help students understand the ideas and methods of solving practical
problems with the concept of calculation ecology but also raise good
computational thinking, innovative thinking, and programming abil-
ity, and then effectively improve the quality of teaching and promote
the development of higher education.
Key Words
Higher education, Python language, minimum knowledge sets, com-
putational thinking
1. Introduction
With the development of higher education, teaching meth-
ods, teaching content, teaching mode, and curriculum sys-
tem need reform to adapt the needs of society. Traditional
higher education is elite education; it often ignores com-
prehensive ability training. More theory than practice and
neglecting the innovation training are the common issues in
∗
School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South
University, People’s Republic of China; e-mail: {xykui, liuwg,
guokehua, xiajiazhi}@csu.edu.cn
∗∗
School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South Univer-
sity, People’s Republic of China; email: hkdu@csu.edu.cn
Corresponding authors: Xiaoyan Kui and Huakun Du
Recommended by Prof. Wenxing Hong
(DOI: 10.2316/Journal.201.2018.4.201-2956)
higher education. Now, thinking ability and practical abil-
ity are the main needs in higher education development,
and traditional teaching methods need to be reformed.
The fundamental of computer program design is the
core curriculum of basic computer teaching in universities,
on one hand, it takes a high-level programming language
as the tool and introduces the basic ideas and methods of
program design; on the other hand, it not only lays the
foundation for subsequent computer courses but also helps
students better understand the basic ideas and methods
for solving the problem of computer. Thus, the courses
of computer programming should be used as the most
direct carrier to train the computational thinking ability
of university students.
Python is a programming language that can make
work quickly and integrate systems more effectively [1].
Python language has many advantages: it is powerful; it
can play well with other languages; it is friendly and easy
to learn; most important of all, Python language is open.
These are main reasons for people using Python than using
other languages. The community of Python is vast, User
base of Python is enthusiastic and their users dedicate to
spread Python language in a wider area. The community of
Python can help support the beginner, the expert, and add
to the ever-increasing open-source knowledge base [1], [2].
2. Related Work
Traditional high-level programming languages often use
more complex and flexible syntax to take into account the
performance of languages, thus the students need to mas-
ter complicated details of concept, even the simplest func-
tion, also involves too many concepts, which restricts the
in-depth application of computer as ubiquitous computing
tools in various fields. Python language was released in
1990, all the codes of interpreter are open, and users can
download all the codes freely in the main website of the
Python language (https://www.python.org).
Python language programming course is a new pro-
gramming course in many universities. With the advan-
tages of Python, students of non-computer professional
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