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This spring I'm going to be teaching a short introduction to Python for college students with little to no computer science experience. I plan to use PythonAnywhere to avoid the hassle of Python installation and setup on dozens of student machines. Not all students have their own laptops, however, so I plan to provide loaner chromebooks.

Are there any gotchas using chromebooks with PythonAnywhere I should know? Preferred chomebook models for this application (not counting the Pixel :-).

Thanks!

I guess the one gotcha in general is make sure you are not behind a prohibitive firewall that might block console connections etc. Test beforehand and get the college IT etc to make exceptions and work it out before the first lesson :D

Not sure about any chromebook specific things. Maybe someone else has some experience?

Hi,

PythonAnywhere works fine when accessed via a chromebook (I am writing this on a Toshiba CB).

Echo Conrad's reply about firewall etc; what I find is I can access PA from my work guest WiFi, and everything works fine but... the Jupyter Notebook will not launch. Not sure why.

I am not sure if you already have your own teaching material prepared; if not one of the presenters at EuroSciPy 2016 gave a great (~ 3 hour) intro to Python, going from print ('Hello World') to designing, building and testing a simple 'Patience' program.It is likely available as a Notebook on the EuroSciPy website.

I will be testing PythonAnywhere with the university firewall in advance. It is probably just a matter of getting the MAC network card addresses on their whitelist.

Thanks for the EuroSciPy reference. I'm mostly developing my own material around the theme of solving problems Mark Whatney faced in book/movie The Martian using simple python scripts (e.g., calculating how many potatoes to grow, translating text to Morse code, calculating the communication lag with Earth), but inspiration from other sources is welcome!