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.

Using Python regular expressions, we will explore programming solutions to some problems that graduate students may encounter:

• Problem 1: "I have a five hundred page document. How can I collect every email address found in that document?"
• Problem 2: "I have an Excel spreadsheet where each row is someone's responses to my survey questions. How do I list all the people who answered 6 or greater to question 1, but did not answer 'yes' to question 4?"

Learning Objectives

In this workshop, students will learn:

1. Recognize the types of tasks that computer programs are good at doing.
2. Write and execute a simple computer program.
3. Describe key concepts like “code”, “csv” and “computer program”.

Before the Workshop

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. Click here for more details on installing Python.

Successfully Tested!

This workshop has been successfully tested on graduate students.