Coding Bootcamp I

Schedule

The first bootcamp takes place in the first week of May 2021, from Monday, May 3, through Friday, May 7.

The second bootcamp takes place in the second week of May 2021, from Monday, May 10, through Saturday, May 15 (Thursday, May 13 is a public holiday).

In both weeks, the core time of the interactive lectures are from 9 am through 5 pm with a long lunch break (noon to 1.30 pm) and short "coffee" breaks.

After 5 pm, the lecturer is available for further one-on-one coaching and other individual questions.

Guest lectures with industry experts may take place after the core times as well.

As of now, the bootcamps are planned to take place on Zoom in small class sizes.

So, if you already need/want to move somewhere else (e.g., to start an internship in a city or your rent in Vallendar expires), this is perfectly ok.

Content

The main purpose of the Coding Bootcamp is to make the student familiar with basic concepts of programming in Python, one of the most important languages used at the moment.

It lays the foundations for further courses in Data Science, Machine Learning, Web Development, and many more.

The Bootcamp takes place within a single week in early May. On five intense days, the students are exposed to a diverse set of programming concepts.

In between, the students use the learned ideas and implement small programs on their own or in small groups.

The small course size enables a one-on-one coaching by the instructor.

The topics introduced are:

• basic elements of a programming language
• modularization via functions
• boolean if-else logic
• flow control via for- or while-loops
• data types (lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, arrays, data frames)
• object-orientation
• replacing Excel with Python
• data mining with APIs (e.g., Google Maps API)

We are going to learn about the basics of Python, the highest in-demand programming language on the job market.

That includes the syntax of the language and an overview of the so-called standard library.

After that, we discuss the fundamentals of designing algorithms and small programs.

Then, we see how easy it is to replace Excel with a real programming language, an excellent place to be, for example, before writing a thesis.

We end the bootcamp with an introduction to Data Science and Machine Learning.

With a real dataset, we learn how to train machine learning models from scratch.

With everything learned, you are well prepared for further studies in the field of data science.

That helps you, for example, in a more quantitative Master program or in with a PhD dissertation.

Yet, you could also take another route, and create your own web/mobile apps, with Python as the basis.

Note: The bootcamp includes a lot of content that is not taught in the course "Intro to Python & Programming" in WHU's B.Sc. program.

We skip a lot of the more theoretical contents and focus on hands-on coding exercises.

For example, none of the data science materials are discussed in the B.Sc. course.