Start programming with Python in 10 steps

This learning block is a guide on how to start programming with Python for students of language or linguistics considering a career in technology and science, or anyone with a similar background and interests.

Its intended use is supervised study, whereby a student learns actively under the supervision of a teacher. To complete all the steps in the guide, students will need to invest around 150 hours of active learning, which includes various activities: reading, watching videos, installing and setting up programs, taking quizzes and writing programs.

The teacher should give students feedback on their progress according to a mutual agreement. The minimum required feedback from the teacher are solutions to some of the tasks. We will share these solutions with the teacher on request. It is in your best interest not to see the solutions before you solve the tasks yourself.

(the overall workload associated with this block amounts to 5 ECTS distributed among the following units)

1. Enter the world of programming 
2. Watch Python code demo 
3. Write and run your first programs
4. Figure out some details
5. Get out of your notebooks
6. Start matching with regular expressions
7. Grow your dictionaries
8. Web is the limit
9. Organise your code with functions and classes
10. Contribute your code

Overall, the materials and activities present in this block will allow students to:

• write or modify a simple Python script for text processing (e.g. to convert data to a given format);
• calculate and output simple statistics (e.g. bigram frequency distribution);
• work with Python libraries (e.g. regular expressions with re);
• work in a collaborative mode (e.g. use servers, Git).

The primary target audience are lecturers who (want to) teach about programming with Python in the domain of linguistics, translation and other language-related areas. Students can also use the materials autonomously, but should be aware that this is not a typical self-study course.