I'm going to teach 10+ people beginning Python and need to install it in their own machines. I opted to go with Miniconda because I would like a painless Python 3 installation with iPython, matplotlib, etc. I am afraid that everyone installing via the network at the same time is going to clog it up. Is there a way to fetch all the packages along with their dependencies ahead of time and install it on their computers in the lecture?
EDIT: I suspect most will be running on Windows.
The easiest way is to just download the Anaconda installers, and keep them on a few USB drives that you can pass around. This is pretty standard practice to do for tutorials like this.
If the people are using their own computers, you should strongly request that people install Anaconda before hand. If they are computer lab computers, install it yourself before the tutorial.
As a more manual way, you can download the packages you need from http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/osx-64/index.html (you may also want to do this for http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/win-32/index.html), and pack them up in a tarball, and then you can conda install packages.tar. Make sure you get all the dependencies, though. You might want to create a conda environment with the packages you want just to see what all is needed (conda create -n test package1 package2 ...).