A couple months ago, I took a free course on Coursera.com offered by Rice University and taught by Joe Warren, Scott Rixner, John Greiner, and Stephen Wong. Coursera offers the course a couple times a year, with 2014 offerings including March 24th and October 7th. The course is now part of the Fundamentals of Computing specialization and you earn a certificate after completion with the ability to earn additional "distinction" for scoring an A in the course (I did).
I recommend the course for anyone between "Isn't Python a snake?" to "Why should I use classes?" Students learn Python by developing simple games in CodeSkulptor, which includes a simple GUI like PyGame without using a terminal or setting up a coding environment. Homework includes quizzes over video material, building games in Python, and evaluating peers' code. I enjoyed the peer reviews because you can recognize common mistakes and see how other people solved the same problem you did. The game development approach finally helped me understand the point of object oriented programming. I went from fear of using classes, to empowered by building my own classes in the last three weeks of the course.
I am looking forward to the next course in the Fundamentals of Computing specialization, Principles of Computing. It is exciting to have an option for continuing to learn after a course. Us self-taught learners often waste time trying to decide what is the most appropriate and useful for us to learn next. If you can tolerate some corny Big Bang references and want to take your Python development to the level of using and understanding classes, you can enroll for free on Coursera.com
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