PyAccountant: Redesigning Programming Education for Accountants

A Python coding tutorial specialized for accountants.

Ty Feng
5 min readAug 9, 2018

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PyAccountant Project Image

Accounting is about the results, not the process, yet too often tedious tasks like data entry can hinder the speed and accuracy of accountants. The need for programming is there. Yet when programming knowledge is actively pursued, the delight of exploring is often overwhelmed by a sea of arcane prose written by the pros, leaving accountants and people without prior programming knowledge a high barrier to start coding.

PyAccountant provides an opportunity for accountants to try coding for the first time, and it lowers the barrier to exploration in the world of code. PyAccountant rekindles playfulness, inspires curiosity, and engages with users through vivid stories and analogies, to invite users to try coding and automating tedious tasks like data entry.

Project Background

Our project, named PyAccountant, is a specialized coding tutorial project created by Ken Chiu, Ty Feng, Jingxian Wu, Albert Tung, and Chi Zhang. This website was our final project for CS160. Our aim was to build a website and help users learn coding in Python by using a novel storytelling method to facilitate learning.

Motivation

Computer science is becoming more and more important as computers become more commonplace, and automation becomes the norm for previously time-intensive tasks. Due to the popularity programming, online programming platforms have been created. However, People from different fields may have different experience in coding,and have different expectations for code. For example, among our target users, accountants, there is not a particular need for understanding programming…

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