Computational Thinking, Programming and Social Sciences, Contact teaching, Contact teaching

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This course builds basics of R/Python programming for social scientists without any previous experience. Course is based on independent study supported with lab sessions and other instruction, with approximately 70 exercises.

Course idea and structure

This course has two weekly meetings: one is solely focused on working on exercises and students can ask help from the teacher and the second one - marked as recommended attendance - includes examining exercises in small groups and going through book chapters and examples. Students must prepare to these sessions by reading assigned materials. In addition, students can use other materials to prepare or work with exercises.

Students are also expected to work on these exercises outside the allocated contact teaching hours.

Learning goals

By the end of the course students can

• produce high-level problem solving strategies for real-world social science problems
• use variables and list their potential role in problem solving
• use control structures to solve problems
• use data structures to help in more complex problem solving
• use software library documentation and use software libraries understand the basic idea of computational complexity and the limits it sets to problem solving

The materials are available for both R and Python. If you have not programmed anything before, we recommend starting with R (and R Studio) in this class.

See course syllabus(Opens in a new tab).

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