Week 5: Feb. 4, 2022
Programming Languages
We’ll demystify programming just enough to give you a starting point, and you’ll use Python to write your first script.
Read, view, and listen
- “The Three Basic Structures: Sequence, Selection, and Loop” (video, 16 min.)
- “CS50 2019, Lecture 0: Scratch” (video, 60 min.)
- “The Problem of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope” (video, 64 min.)
In-class activities
- Introduction to class
- Problem of Access discussion
- Slides: Introduction to control structures and Colab notebooks. (We’ll walk through these together.)
- Your first Colab notebook.
- Break.
- During the break, download your Amazon order data.
- After returning from the break, we’ll branch off:
For my tech-confidents:
Feel free to work independently. Work through these TensorFlow tutorials to learn how to train a neural-networking machine-learning model. For your homework, please report on what you did (and show examples, if you can).
For my beginners:
Stay with me!
- Getting started with Python (Colab notebook; work on your own, then we’ll come back together)
- How much did you spend on Amazon? (Colab notebook: work on your own, feel free to come back to this later)
Some extra resources for you
- (Brief!) video refresher on how to interact with a Colab notebook
- Harvard’s CS50 class
- LinkedIn Learning: Python Essential Training
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (my favorite book for learning Python)
- Python Projects for Beginners (use UCLA VPN to access the book)
- Introducing Python (use UCLA VPN to access the book)
- Feb. 9: Introduction to Remote Sensing with Python workshop