Concordia University

Have you ever done repetitive work on a computer and wondered if there's a better way? Or are you curious where software comes from, and what it means to "write" software? In this workshop, explore the very basics of computer programming and see how it can help you with your graduate studies in any discipline.

This workshop is composed of two sessions, one theoretical and one more “hands-on” where the participants will choose a simple task that interests them and write a Python program for it. Each participant will get to choose what type of “hands-on” experience they want to have, be it a text-based game or a code that subsets a data set and calculates the mean average of your data. You can team up or work individually.

IMPORTANT NOTE
Participants must bring their own laptop with them to the workshop. Prior to the workshop, students must install Python 3.5 (or higher) on their laptop. For more details on installing Python, visit: https://www.python.org/downloads/. A step-by-step installation guide is available below. If you encounter problems with the installation, please make sure that you have a laptop with internet access for the first session.

Learning Objectives

After this workshop, students will:
1. Be able to describe key concepts such as scripting languages, Python script, executing a code, built-in function and comma-separated values (csv) file type;
2. Know the types of tasks that computer programs are good at doing;
3. Know a minimum of 5 python built-in functions;
4. Be able to write and execute a simple Python script.

Leaders Information

This workshop is led by Tugba Nur Ozturk, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Physics.

Tugba’s research focuses on molecular modeling of calcium-sensing and calcium-transport proteins, and involves a lot of coding with different scripting languages such as Bash, Octave, Python, R and Tcl. Besides her Ph.D. thesis, she is also interested in computer-assisted teaching, especially in interdisciplinary fields such as biochemistry.