Code Lab Curriculum Notes

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Topics / Ideas

what can we cover in an hour?

First Semester

Using a computer

• how a computer reads and executes code (program flow)
• python interpreter (hello world)
• command line (bash)
• git / GitHub
• impostor syndrome / how to learn / fearlessness talk by shane

Intro to Programming

• data structures
• logic and conditionals
• functions
• debugging (stack traces, print statements)
• package management (pipenv)
• text interpreter (sublime, atom, vscode)
• how to find help (stack overflow, man page, documentation, github)
• how to comment files

Data

• i/o files
• file formats (json, csv, txt, yaml, xml, markdown)
• encoding

THE web

• html, css, javascript
• browser
• the internet (http)
• web scrapping (beatifulsoup)

Websites

• pelican
• publishing to the web/deployment

Data manipulation

• pandas
• regex
• python libraries
• jupyter notebook

---

Second semester

APIs

• flask
• server side

Databases

• sqlite
• sql syntax

Advanced data manipulation

• text mining (nltk , htrc)
• networks (networkx)
• thinking quantitatively (why/why not)

Data visualization

• altair/vega/bokeh
• making arguments with visual data

Algorithms

• analysis
• intro to computation theory
• scikit

Programming Patterns

• paradigms (functional programming, OOP)
• design patterns and SOLID

[walshbr]

Thanks! I know this is just a collection of all goals and possible topics, but were you imagining roughly 2-3 weeks on each of these sections? Just trying to imagine how this fits onto the skeleton of two semesters, but also aware you might not be ready to start thinking in those terms yet.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

I think we're realizing that the 'first semester' might be more of the first year given the size of the topics. I think most of the topics are two weeks though some might be able to squeezed into one week sessions. We were talking that the second semester topics might be offered as stand alone workshops depending on interest. We were just brainstorming yesterday and so I wrote these down, but we can flush things out more in the coming weeks.

[walshbr]

Those were my thoughts exactly. I think the first semester as year approach sounds good, and also allows for flexibility if people are flailing and need to go slower. And then the second term things can be more specialized depending on what we have them work on.

[amandavisconti]

I am really excited for this.

[walshbr]

@ZoeLeBlanc @shane-et-al - do you have a calendar for the first part of the term together yet? Just looking for broad strokes as I start booking people for workshops.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

@walshbr no calendar yet but I expect we'll work on it next week, right @shane-et-al ? We might have to rework a few things given our schedules but generally each unit should be two weeks or so...