Accelerated Python Programming with Social Science Applications

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course is the first in a three-quarter sequence that teaches computational thinking and essential skills to students in the social sciences. Lectures in the class will cover topics such as functions, data structures, classes and objects, as well as recursion. Assignments will give students the opportunity to practice these computing concepts using the Python programming language and apply the computational logic in a wide variety of social science applications. Previous example assignments include modeling epidemics, modeling language shifts, analyzing candidate tweets from presidential debates, determining the number of machines needed at a polling place, predicting housing price with linear regression models