Python workshop for beginners continues its success

 

 

 

For the second time this year, Women in Computer Science (WiCS) at the University of Waterloo organized a three-day programming workshop for complete novices. The first workshop, organized in January this year, sparked a great interest that prompted over 340 application and received excellent feedback. Over 270 application for the second workshop indicated that the interest in learning how to code is still great among University students and other members of the community.

 

The motivation for these workshops comes from students with no programming experience or students in non-STEM field programs who expressed a need to learn programming. Apart from potential administrative barriers to integrate Computer Science courses into non-CS curriculums, taking such introductory courses can be challenging for those without any background in the field. The goal of this intense workshop was to teach participants programming basics through interactive lectures, hands-on exercises and projects that would help them more easily grasp basic Computer Science concepts that they could use in their studies or workplace. The curriculum covered basic programming concepts such as data types, variables, conditionals, loops, functions and the use of Python libraries for data analysis and processing. After three days, participants learned how to write a simple script to read data stored on the drive, and process and visualize this data in a format that can be used to create a lab report or a paper.

 

To aid participants in mastering such a difficult skill, there were eight student volunteers: three instructors teaching the content and five mentors providing individual attention and support. Lunches and refreshments were provided for free thanks to the generous support of the Google for Education program and WiCS. This reinforced interactions between participants, which ensured an open and friendly atmosphere that facilitated the learning experience.

Based on the feedback collected in the post-workshop survey, all participants would recommend the workshop to others and over 95% rated the workshop as excellent. Also, the majority of participants said they expect that knowledge gained in the workshop will be useful to their studies and workplace. Most importantly, after participating in the workshop, all participants reported that they feel more confident to take introductory programming CS classes than before the workshop. 

The workshop has not only shown how powerful and useful a skill coding can be, but it demonstrated that learning how to code can be a highly social and engaging activity, a perfect opportunity to entertain curious minds and ways of thinking. Or, as expressed in the words of one of the participants: Perhaps it would be difficult for people to think one weekend can change a person’s life, but for a naturally curious person such as myself it has. I never thought it would happen, but lately, anytime I hear about a cool new feature or even when I am on the Internet, my mind always asks: “Oh I wonder what the code for this is?"