Education News

Take (or design!) Programming 101 with PyCharm Educational Edition 1.0.1

Today we’re making publicly available a new version of our free, easy and professional tool for learning programming with Python. Please welcome PyCharm Educational Edition 1.0.1!

If you haven’t checked this tool out, learn how it helps novice programmers with little or no previous programming experience to learn programming with Python easily and effectively.

A couple of months ago we announced the first version of PyCharm Educational Edition. Thousands of downloads and heaps of valuable feedback have poured in since then. We did our best to use this input and insight to improve the tool.

The most notable improvement in v1.0.1 is the Introduction to Python learning course, which is available out of the box right after you install the tool:

welcome

It’s pretty simple to go through the default learning course in PyCharm—just follow this tutorial or watch this short demo. Anyway, we’ve enhanced this introduction course to make it much more intelligent and provide many new smart interactive checks, hints and suggestions, and better task descriptions and texts:

check

Another useful improvement in PyCharm Educational Edition 1.0.1 is that now you can always interrupt the task check. This is useful if your code hangs for some reason. For example here is a solution that results in an infinite loop and hangs the task check:

hangs

Simply click the Cancel icon and try solving the task again:

hang2

When jumping between answer placeholders, now it’s possible to edit them right from the cursor position (whereas previously the whole placeholder would get selected):

selections

If an error occurs while solving a task, now you can navigate to the place in the code where the error is found:

navigate

There are many other minor improvements in this release, so we encourage you to download and try it yourself! Unfortunately there will be no patch update from previous PyCharm Educational Edition v1.0 so please re-install PyCharm manually.

As a reminder, teachers, instructors and course authors can also use PyCharm Educational Educational Edition to create their own courses and share them with their students or with thousands users of PyCharm Educational Edition all around the globe. Read more about how this works and see the complete tutorial for course authors on how to create your own interactive course. Or, for a quick visual overview, watch this video:

http://youtu.be/He0WiNq1Ddc

Don’t wait any longer—download PyCharm Education Edition 1.0.1 for your platform and start learning (or teaching) Python programming today!

Other fun things you can do:

  • Spread the word about this tool
  • Follow us on twitter
  • Report bugs in our public issue tracker
  • If you ever need help, you’re always welcome to contact our professional support team
  • Read our blog to stay tuned for news, updates and everything that goes on with PyCharm Educational Edition. And do give us feedback on how we’re doing!

Develop with pleasure!
JetBrains PyCharm Team

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