Welcome to the official site for the SURGE Discover Coding workshop series! This is a work in progress (volunteers wecome) so please forgive the rough edges. We're still in alpha mode :)
The SURGE Discover Coding series is aimed at people from science disciplines who have no previous experience with a programming language. We teach the basic of coding using Python, a very popular language used in science and data science (with plans to expand into R in the near future). If you have programmed before, but are new to Python, you will also find this workshop useful (if perhaps a bit slow at times).
This is not an introduction to computer science. The SURGE Discover Coding series aims to teach people working in science how to use Python as a tool for working with data. As such, our focus is on:
- learning the fundamentals of Python
- learning the fundamentals of programming logic
- using Python for data science, including:
- reading data
- manipulating/processing data (e.g., extracting specific data, splitting data according to variables, applying functions, combining data)
- exploratory data analysis
- basic statistical analyses of data sets
The Discover Coding series is adapted from open-source lessons developed by the Software Carpentries. Software Carpentries is part of a large volunteer-driven organization dedicated to teaching scientific coding through an open-source, community-developed curriculum. Many members of the SURGE Discover Coding teaching team are Software Carpentries-certified instructors.
We have adapted our Python curriculum from Software Carpentries' Programming and Plotting in Python lesson. It uses freely-available open source data from Gapminder, an independent Swedish foundation whose mission is to "fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand." Gapminder is perhaps most famous for the TED talks given by its co-founder, the late Dr. Hans Rosling (the other founders were Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund). Dr. Rosling's TED talk, The best statistics you’ve ever seen, became one of the most watched TED talks ever (nearly 15m views as of Feb. 4, 2021).
We have adapted the Software Carpentry (SC) version of the workshop based on experience teaching it. We have great respect for the SC organization and its aims. Adapting and customizing the workshop (and giving credit where it is due) is in the spirit of the open source movement and open educational resources, which SURGE wholeheartedly supports.
Go to the Introduction to Scientific Python lesson
Licensed under CC-BY 4.0 2018–2021 by SURGE