Hi, I am Steve Oney.
I'm an assistant professor here in the School of Information at
the University of Michigan.
So I teach some of the introductory programming classes in the school of
information.
And I'm really excited to have you join us because I really think programming is
going to increasingly be a fundamentally important literacy and
a way of dealing with the increasing amounts of data that we get and
deal with in our everyday lives.
In my private life, I play soccer, like professor Resnick,
I am an avid biker as well, and you will be seeing me in courses one, two and four.
Most of my research deals with making programming tools more usable.
In other words, making programming tools that are designed around the ways
that people think and the ways that we actually program as well.
>> Hi, I'm Paul Resnick.
I'm a professor and associate dean for
research at the University of Michigan School of Information.
As associate dean, I don't get to teach that much, but I really enjoy teaching
the material that I'll be teaching you in this specialization, and
I'm glad to have a chance to share it with you.
You'll see me in courses one and two, almost all of course three, and
a little bit in course four.
I am a fan of nerdy pun humor, also known as dad jokes, and so
I'll be sharing a few of those with you at the end of some of the lessons.
In my research, I'm probably best known for,
what's now known as recommender systems.
I first published on this back in the early 90s, things like at
Amazon where it says, people who bought this book also bought these other books.
And more recently, I've been working on online communities and
then on educational technologies.
In my personal life, I like to play tennis and ride a bike.
I've ridden very slowly up a couple of the iconic climbs of the Tour de France,
four years ago up Mont Ventoux, and
a couple of years ago up the Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees.
I don't travel nearly as much as Dr. Chuck, but I do look forward to trying to
adopt his practice of holding live office hours in places when I do get to travel.
So maybe I'll get a chance to see him.
See you in the lessons.
>> Hi, my name is Jackie Cohen,
and I'm a lecturer at the University of Michigan School of Information.
I teach a lot of programming courses,
including courses a lot like the ones you'll see here.
And I also build, and design, and support a lot of course resources.
All of this means that I've seen a lot of different students,
complete a lot of different programming projects.
And what I'll be doing here is orienting you to the end of course projects, and
giving you some hints and tips about what might be useful and
exciting while working on them.
I hope you enjoy them because I think they're really fun, and they'll give you
a lot of tools for working with programming in your every day life.
>> Hi, I'm Chris Brooks, I'm faculty here at the University of Michigan.
In this specialization, I'll be teaching the last course.
In that course, you're going to take image manipulation libraries, and
large image sets, and use Python to change it into a useful information.
My research focuses on educational technology, and
I teach a lot of data science courses including some on this platform.
And I'm very interested in how learners like you approach technology,
interact with technology, and use it to enable your learning.
I'm looking forward to seeing you in that last course.
>> Hello, my name is Charles Severance.
And you may have seen me before in the Python for Everybody specialization,
which is some of you took that and then came to this class.
I'm really enjoying what I'm doing in this class, and that I'm not actually teaching
any of the core material, but I'm doing what we call the way the programmer.
And that is sort of, I get to play a little bit and
not actually teach you anything but show you something cool, and
that gave me a lot of freedom to show things that I consider fun.
My research area, as some of you may know, is educational technology.
The platform that you're using is something I'm very curious about,
how we can improve it, how we can make it better.
And I have lots of hobbies, but
my most recent hobby is racing, racing on road courses.
So if you look, you might find a picture of me in a race car.
>> Hi, I'm Lauren Murphy.
I took the on-campus version of this course a couple years ago and
ended up working as an instructional aid to help other students learn the material.
I since returned to help out with this course, building up the quizzes and
assessments and projects that you'll be doing.
I'm very excited that you have the opportunity to learn the same material,
and I hope that you have a good time.
>> And in this specialization, for
Python 3 programming, you learn how to become a competent Python programmer
by learning the fundamentals of the language in detail.
You'll learn how to navigate complex data structures and
accumulate results from them.
And you'll learn how to convert data into a format that can be used by
other programs.
At the end of the specialization,
you'll be able to write Python programs of a few 100 lines.
You'll be able to use an integrated Python modules into your code.
You'll be able to use external tools like API's by reading their documentation
as well.
We start from the beginning, and we don't assume any prior knowledge, but
we do go deep into the fundamentals of Python to be sure that you understand
every aspect of code.
>> So you want to say something about what's our
Runestone interactive environment and- >> Yeah, so
the Runestone interactive textbook allows you to interleave learning materials
with ActiveCode assessments that will allow you to actually write code.
And we find that writing code is really important because
even though you can learn how a concept works in theory, so
you might know how some particular feature of Python works.
It's really important to actually write code to gain more of a working
understanding.
And to know how to actually apply those concepts and practice.
So there's also the way of the programmer segments.
So most of the course is about how to use Python and learning about Python features.
The way of the programmer segment is more about how programmers can and should work.
Programming is a little bit more of an art than a science.
There's lots of correct ways to do things, but there are best practices.
So there are things like how to write programs incrementally,
in the way of the programmer segments.
You'll also learn about how to write good automated test cases.
So that's going to come in course four.
Until then, we are going to write those test cases for you.
>> Lauren has created a whole lot of assessments where, not only can you
run the code in the browser, but it will tell you whether you got it right or not.
And you get that immediate feedback, and you can try it as many times as you want.
In fact, we've set up the assessment so that you have to get it right,
you get everything right, 100%, in order to pass the assessment.
And the reason for that is we really want you to build mastery so that you don't
go on to the later stuff until you've got the early material really solid.
>> You'll also notice that in all of the projects that you do,
you'll find ways of translating the concepts that you learn in the courses and
throughout the specialization into your real life.
For example, different ways of building programs that might be fun in your job, or
your school, or your work, or whatever it is that you do.
>> So one of the things that I really like,
as I've watched you all put this together, is Python for Everybody.
And you've kind of already said this, in Python for Everybody,
I really focus on the program.
If you get the program, it's like you win, you get the gold star.
And we didn't have the time or
the luxury to really understand what was going on inside the program, or
just like we got the program done and we going to move on to the next thing.
But with some of the stuff we have in Runestone, you get to say,
what's really going on inside of the program and how does this really work?
And that's part of the mastery, so that if you can, as a programmer, kind of put
yourself inside the program and understand how the program is actually functioning.
It is difficult to write more sophisticated programs.
And so, that's where, even though there's technically as a beginning course,
I think it's really important for people to take more than one beginning course
because you have to go over the same material, over and
over with, in a sense, deeper understanding each time you go through it.
>> Yeah, we have this great codelens tool, I think you're referring to,
it let's you visualize what's happening in the execution of the program
one line at a time.
And, you can go Forward and
Back and see, what actually was the value of that variable?
And when did my list change what its contents were?
And so, it gives you a way of thinking about it.
It's really great for debugging so that you don't have to just do trial and error.
Let me change something in the code.
You can really think through what does the program do.
>> So another thing that students always ask me at the end of my course is,
what next?
And I think that it's kind of cool that you built into this specialization kind
of, or step into what they're going to do after this, Chris.
>> Yeah, so one of the things that we've added to this course at the very end of
the project course, and
that's really to focus people on how to take other APIs that might be out there or
packages and use them and do something novel with them outside of just learning.
And it gets to this repeated practice comment that you made.
And for that, we're actually doing it within the Jupyter environment.
So just like you need repeated practice with APIs and with Python fundamentals,
there's so many different places that you can write a Python code and Runestone's,
one of them and the tools you use in Python for everyone or one of those.
Jupyter is one that's quite common and we teach that in the Data Science
specialization that students can follow this with.
And there's other environments too, and so we're trying to really showcase
a diversity of learning environments and production environments for Python.
>> Programming is not one environment, right?
It's not like you have this one thing, you type the stuff in and
that's all the programming.
When you/'re out in the real world,
each job often has different kinds of environments.
>> Yeah, and practice is so important in the context of programming.
I think Lauren has written some great examples of practice problems for
you to work on throughout the course as well.
>> And we have this great practice tool that you'll get to see where it represents
to you for review some questions that you've already seen in the past.
And it keeps presenting them to you more frequently if you're having trouble,
less frequently if you're showing mastery of them.
And it's a way to really reinforce what you've got, so look for
that practice tool.
It also had this fun fireworks that it'll show when you've
done all of your practice problems for the day.
>> So, as you can tell, we're all really excited to share this material with you.
And we hope you have a lot of fun and wish you a lot of luck.
>> Here at the University of Michigan, our school colors are maize and blue.
You might think of them as yellow and blue, but we call it maize and blue.
And if I travel anywhere and I have a Michigan logo thing on,
someone will come up to me in the airport and say, go blue.
So on three.
One, two, three.
>> Go blue.