Python workshop for beginners proves successful

Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Programming and understanding of how computers work has traditionally been taught in computer science courses. However, knowing how to make computers do automatic and repetitive tasks makes everyone more efficient in their studies, research or workplace. The primary goal of the programming workshop, organized at the university by Women in Computer Science and supported by the Python Software Foundation, was to make this knowledge accessible to everyone.
 
Python Workshop
 
The three day workshop held in January 2016, sparked a great interest
among students, staff and faculty members. Thirty-two participants were
selected among 345 applicants, resulting in a diverse group of students
from various departments such as arts, environment, science and applied health sciences. All participants were complete novices and had no prior programming experience. Together with a group of six student mentors and two student instructors, participants learned basic programming concepts through interactive lectures, quizzes, projects and individual instruction using the Python programming language. Participants started by learning programming basics such as data types, variables, conditionals and program flow control.
 
The curriculum also covered advanced data types and concepts such as using libraries written by other programmers to analyse the data on historical temperature changes. After three days, the participants with no prior programming knowledge were able to write a script which extracts and processes the data, allows them to answer their questions about the data and produces figures ready to be included in their papers, reports or theses within just a few hours.
 
All participants would recommend the workshop to others and over 80% rated the workshop as excellent. Learning how to code was challenging, but with the support of mentors and instructors they felt encouraged and excited to apply the knowledge in the project and later in their own research. 
 
Overall, the workshop was an enjoyable learning experience for everyone
involved, showing that coding and learning how to code is an exciting and fun activity.
 
Python infographic
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