Spreading the Adoption of Python in India: the FOSSEE Python Project

The FOSSEE (Free Open Source Software for Science and Engineering Education) project (http://fossee.in) is funded by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, MHRD, (http://mhrd.gov.in) of the Government of India. The FOSSEE project is based out of IIT Bombay and the goal of the project is to eliminate the use of proprietary tools in the college curriculum. FOSSEE promotes various open source packages. Python is one of them.

In this paper, the Python-related activities and initiatives of FOSSEE are discussed. The group focuses on promoting the use of Python in the college curriculum. The important activities of this group include the creation of spoken-tutorials on Python, the creation of 400+ IPython-based textbook companions, an online testing tool for a variety of programming languages, a course akin to software carpentry at IIT Bombay, the organization of the SciPy India conference, and finally spreading the adoption of Python in schools and colleges. The paper discusses how these tools may be used to teach Python in the context of collegiate education and computational science.