Introduction to Python for Researchers

Course Overview

This course teaches the fundamentals of Python 3 in the context of academic research. Our tutor team support researchers across the whole of Imperial College London, including in science, engineering, mathematics, computing, medicine, and business. We have created this course to help our learners and researchers elsewhere prepare for modern research, which often includes a substantial amount of programming. You'll gain the basic skills needed to produce substantial programming projects which are accurate, professional, scalable, and which perform effectively. This will set you up well for the type of programming you'll need to do as a researcher. In this course, you'll learn: • the basics of Python including variables, types, if-blocks, loops, functions and exceptions. • how to write code using Visual Studio Code, which is a modern, professional tool used by programmers across all disciplines and professions. • best practices and the reasoning behind them, with a focus on developing skills and knowledge to help you become a confident and independent programmer. Projects throughout the course will allow you to practise designing and structuring progressively larger pieces of code - so, by the end, you'll be ready to produce the sort of code expected of a researcher. Throughout the course, you can draw on support from the learning community, sharing with your peers, answering questions, and giving feedback on solutions to exercises. This course is designed to be appropriate for complete novices to programming or learners who may already know another programming language. We hope you enjoy learning Python with us!