The Sports Python Educational Project

In 2022 Rho Zeta AI was awarded a grant from the EuroPython Society (EPS), a Swedish non-profit organisation which supports the Python community in Europe, to seed a new initiative called the Sports Python Educational Project. The aim of the project is to democratise access to Python education, ultimately to develop a more inclusive global Python community.

The project focuses on the development of sport-themed Open Educational Resources (OERs) that learners and educators can freely access to self-study or teach introductory Python programming. The works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The first set of deliverables Rho Zeta AI has developed for the project enable Python teaching and learning through Football (Soccer) Analytics many sports enthusiasts are familiar with from mainstream media.

Photo of a university classroom with students sitting with their laptops and an instructor at the front of the room presenting a computing environment with a data visualisation shown.

We have carried out a variety of EuroPython Society grant-funded public engagement using the Football Analytics OERs to-date, including a collaboration with Birkbeck, University of London and a local South London secondary school, Southfields Academy (both pictured). The outreach through this project has so far consistently received strong-to-excellent positive feedback from stakeholders.

Photo of a female-presenting secondary school student sat in a school computer lab in front of a PC working on a code exercise.