I'm an IT major, here's my story of teaching coding to a non-major
My sibling (from the humanities track) wanted to learn coding, so I taught them for 3 months.
Goal: Web scraping + simple data analysis
Method:
1. Python basics (2 weeks) - variables, conditionals, loops
2. Libraries (3 weeks) - requests, beautifulsoup, pandas
3. Mini project (4 weeks) - scrape a specific site and save to Excel
4. Error handling (3 weeks) - debugging, habit of googling
Result: My sibling reached the level of scraping Naver News on their own. Non-majors can learn surprisingly fast if taught the right way. Feel free to reference this if you're interested.
7 answers
Wow, that's impressive!
Possible in 3 months? Might be a bit tough.
I'm also a non-major, and I gave up after only listening to online lectures. If it's done this systematically, it would definitely be different. I'm envious.
requests, bs4, and pandas are sufficient for the basics of web crawling. I'd also recommend selenium or scrapy later on. And spending three weeks on error handling seems really important. For non-majors, the habit of googling is the most crucial.
But crawling Naver news requires checking robots.txt, and if the structure changes dynamically, it wouldn't be easy. Reaching that level in just three months either means your sibling is naturally gifted or the example was simple, right?
Wow, I want to try that too. Can you give me more details about the curriculum?
I'm also a major student and have taught my younger sibling before. But two weeks of basics was too short. I set aside about a month. Instead, jumping into a project right away made it more interesting. The method is similar, but time allocation seems to vary from person to person.