This website will shut down soon. We Recommend Completing The Lessons On Our New Website CodeSciLab.Org

Learn to Program:

The OSP CodeLab strives to inspire a new generation of computational scientists by providing free online lessons to individuals and classrooms that might otherwise not be exposed to the world of programming and to provide context for how a programming skill set can be used to solve problems in science and technology sectors. These lessons are not intended as a replacement to scientific curricula but rather as a supplemental resource for curious students and educators.

CodeLab will teach you the basics of programming in Python to solve real-world science problems.

We have created a number of lessons that range in topic from biology to statistics to physics to image analysis. These lessons assume no prior knowledge in programming or any of these scientific fields. Programming beginners will probably want to proceed through the first lessons in order, but you should also feel free to jump to lessons that interest and excite you!

To begin a lesson, click on its icon below or select it from the lessons drop-down menu in the navigator.

Each lesson begins by stating the learning objectives for that lesson. If it sounds interesting, then jump in! We cover both programming basics and scientific background in each lesson, with instructions interspersed with example code. At the end of each section, we also encourage you to write your own code to solve problems. 

Our Lessons:

Instructions

Instructions for lessons: press the “run” button at the top of the embedded code terminal (these are hosted on an external website called repl.it). This will cause anything in the white text box to be executed below, in the black section. So if you write a mathematical calculation in the white text box (such as print(4 +5)), the answer to it (the output) will be displayed in the black section after you press “run.” In many of these exercises, the code has been written out for you, and all you need to do is press “run.” Later, there will be exercises where we ask you to write code yourself — in those cases, write out the code in the white box and then press “run.” For additional information on the coding terminals, read our guide here.

Click any of the lessons below to get started! Or click here for a list with more details about every lesson.