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About

This course is designed and created by Dr. Trenton Wirth, Psychology Professor at the University of Cincinnati.

It is made with the intention of introducing anyone to the basics of programming, with a focus on Python. The course is designed to be accessible to anyone, regardless of their prior experience with programming.

The code for this project follows the GNU General Public License v3.0, and the course content follows the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You can find details of these licenses in the Licenses tab of this website.

Trent is not a computer scientist, and doesn't claim to be an expert on programming. However, his journey of learning programming as a behavioral scientist himself equips him with the empathy and patience to develop a course targetting non-technical students who want to learn how to engage in scientific programming.

You can reach Trent at his University email: wirthtd AT ucmail DOT uc DOT edu

Use of Generative AI (LLMs)

The initial creation of this course within a single semester would likely not have been possible without the use of generative AI.

I (Trent) used AI extensively to draft aspects of the course, particularly the Learning Paths. Here is how I used AI in the creation of this course:

  1. I knew the general goals of the course, and I interacted with a mixture of Copilot and GPT4 (original, not o) to build up the first few learning path steps in a way that I felt satisfied the goals of my class.
  2. These initial steps were then edited and tested by me before I presented them to students.
  3. With the first few steps of the path complete, for every subsequent step I used all previous steps as a part of the prompt for creating the next one - I believe this helped to maintain a relatively consistent style and pacing throughout.

    Rather than copy paste each of the files, I would attach a .md file that contained "all of the steps" up to that point - this was a part of my prompt.

People have a lot of feelings about the use of generative AI - I feel that the way I've used it here is reasonable and ethical, this is basically a curated version of the concept of the generative textbook.

If you think I've done something terrible, please drop me a line - I'd be happy to hear from you. : )