Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2014)

Welcome to the Community Data Workshops — a series of four sessions designed to introduce some of the basic tools of programming and data analysis to beginners.

Registration
Registration is currently closed and, sadly, we are oversubscribed! Even though we've found a much bigger room and doubled our capacity, we have still had to turn away many people. That said, we certainly hope to organize more workshops like these in the future. You can watch (or subscribe to) the Network Collective blog where we will post more information in the future.

Schedule
All sessions are interactive and involve you programming on your own and on your own laptop. Everybody attending should bring a laptop and a power cord so that they don't run out of battery.

Session 0 (Friday April 4th Evening 6-9pm)
Come to CMU 104 between 6:00 and 9:00pm. It's OK if you come late but you'll want to have as much time as you can to finish the setup and self-directed assignments so come as close to 6pm as you can.

During this session, mentors will help you:


 * set up your development environment
 * learn how to execute Python code from a file and interactively from a Python prompt
 * learn about printing and using Python as a calculator

We understand that there are some people who will attend the Saturday workshop but who cannot make it the Friday session. That's OK but it means that you'll be on your own and responsible to get everything set up before our first meeting on Saturday morning. We'll post all the information for the Friday session on this page and you will able to follow along.

Session 1 (Saturday April 5th)

 * Morning, 10am-noon: a 2 hour lecture-based introduction to the Python programming language
 * Lunch, noon-1pm: We'll provide lunch
 * Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm: Python practice through short projects on a variety of fun and practical topics
 * Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm: Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Session 2 (Saturday May 3rd)
Details will be posted later.

Session 3 (Saturday May 31st)
Details will be posted later.

Resources

 * Friday April 4th setup and tutorial
 * Saturday April 5th lecture
 * Saturday April 5th projects
 * CodeAcademy exercises

Location
The University of Washington Department of Communication is hosting the event. We are located in the Communications building (CMU) on the Seattle UW campus. The Friday setup and the morning lectures will both be held in CMU 104. We will move into other rooms in the building for the workshop parts of the sessions.

You can find the building on this Google map or on this campus map from UW.

Parking at UW is available but is not free. There is self-serve parking as well as gatehouses that are staffed from 7am on Saturday and can issue you parking passes and point you to an appropriate lot. More details are on the UW Commuter Services website for Visitors and Guests. UW is also well served by public transportation and easily accessible by bicycle with the Burke Giilman Trail.

If you have any questions about the event, you can contact [mailto:makohill@uw.edu makohill@uw.edu].

What to bring

 * 1) a laptop (ideally one with a Python environment set up. See Session 0 information, above)
 * 2) a power cord
 * 3) a sense of adventure!

Food
Thanks to generous sponsorship by the eScience Institute at UW, we will provide catered lunchs during the Saturday sessions. Although we haven't figured out the menu, we will make sure to have plenty of vegetarian and vegan options. If the food we have doesn't doesn't work for you, there is a food court open for lunch in the HUB (the UW student center) that is almost directly next door.

Social Media

 * We use the hashtag #cdsw

Thanks!
This event would be possible without all the volunteer mentors, the advice and direction of Open Hatch and support of the UW Department of Communication and UW eScience Institute.