People sign up for a Python course because they want to write Python. The thing most often gets in the way of that, on day one, is not the language — it's the laptop. Wrong version of Python in the PATH. A path with a space in it. A corporate firewall blocking pip.
By the time we'd debug all of that on twelve different machines in week one, half the cohort would have lost interest.
So the first two weeks of PySprout happen in Google Colab. You sign in to a Google account. You open a notebook. You write code. Nothing else. The Python is running on someone else's computer, somewhere, and you don't need to know where.
This is also how a surprising amount of professional data work actually happens — analysts and researchers spend much of their day in notebooks, not in IDEs. So Colab isn't training wheels. It's a real tool.
We move to local Python at the end of Week 2, when you've written enough code to be motivated to set up the rest, and we set it up live together. By that point installing Python feels like ten minutes of paperwork rather than a wall.
If you want a head start, the optional local Python setup page has the install walkthrough. But please don't let it block you.
See you in Colab.