Welcome to the official site for the SURGE Discover Coding workshop series! This is a work in progress (volunteers welcome) 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 the R language in the near future). If you have programmed before, but are new to Python, you will also find these workshops useful (if perhaps a bit slow at times).
Upcoming Workshops
Please check out the SURGE events page for upcoming workshops.
Our Approach
This is not an introduction to computer science. The SURGE Discover Coding series aims to teach people working in science how to use programming languages as tools for working with data. As such, our focus is on:
- learning the fundamentals of a coding language (Python or R)
- learning the fundamentals of programming logic
- using a programming language 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
Our Workshops
The Discover Coding series is adapted from open-source lessons developed by the Software Carpentry’s. Software Carpentry 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 Carpentry-certified instructors.
Discover Python
We have developed our Discover Python workshop as a first introduction to scientific coding, using the Python language. This has been adapted from Software Carpentry’s Programming and Plotting in Python lesson. We work with data from Gapminder](https://www.gapminder.org), 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. Regardless of what scientific discipline you come from, you should find that this workshop is general-purpose enough to give you the fundamentals of coding and data science and Python.