POP77001 Computer Programming for Social Scientists

Michaelmas Term 2022

About This Module

This module provides foundational knowledge of computer programming concepts and software engineering practices. It introduces students to major data science programming languages and workflows, with a focus on social science data and research questions. Students will be introduced to R and Python, two principal data science programming languages. This course covers basic and intermediate programming concepts, such as object types, functions, control flow, testing and debugging. Particular emphasis will be made on data handling and analytical tasks with a focus on problems in social sciences. Homeworks will include hands-on coding exercises. In addition, students will apply their programming knowledge on a research project at the end of the module.

Instructors

• Tom Paskhalis, Office Hours: Thursday 11:00-13:00 online
• Martyn Egan

Module Meetings

• 11 two-hour lectures
  • Monday 14:00 in PX 201 7-9 Leinster Street South
• 11 two-hour tutorials
  • Thursday 09:00 in PX 201 7-9 Leinster Street South
• No lecture/tutorial in Week 7

Week	Lecture (Monday)	Language	Topic	Due (Friday)
1	12 September	-	Introduction to Computation
2	19 September	R	R Basics
3	26 September	R	Control Flow in R	Assignment 1
4	3 October	R	Functions in R
5	10 October	R	Debugging and Testing in R	Assignment 2
6	17 October	R	Data Wrangling in R
7	24 October	-	-
8	31 October	Python	Fundamentals of Python Programming I
9	7 November	Python	Fundamentals of Python Programming II	Assignment 3
10	14 November	Python	Data Wrangling in Python
11	21 November	Python, R	Complexity and Performance	Assignment 4
12	28 November	Python, R	Web Scraping

Prerequisites

This is an introductory class and no prior experience with programming is required.

Hardware and Software

• Laptop with Windows/Mac/Linux OS (no Chrome books)
• Required software:
  • Jupyter - web-based interactive computational environment
  • Python (version 3+) - versatile programming language
  • R (version 4+) - statistical programming language
• Additional software:
  • Git - version control system
  • GitHub - git-based online platform for code hosting
  • RStudio - integrated development environment for R
  • Spyder - integrated development environment for Python
  • Visual Studio Code - feature-rich text editor

See syllabus for further details.

Module Materials

• Course website: tinyurl.com/POP77001
• GitHub repository: github.com/ASDS-TCD/POP77001_Computer_Programming_2022

Additional Materials

Books:

• Guttag, John. 2021 Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python: With Application to Computational Modeling and Understanding Data. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

• Matloff, Norman. 2011. The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press.

• McKinney, Wes. 2017. Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media

• Peng, Roger D. 2016. R Programming for Data Science. Leanpub

• Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.

• Wickham, Hadley. 2019. Advanced R. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Online:

• Git Book

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python

• Python For You and Me

• Python Wikibook

• Python 3 Documentation (intermediate and advanced)

• R Documentation

• R Inferno

Assessment

• Participation (10 %)

  • Tutorial attendance

• 4 assignments (40%)

  • Bi-weekly programming exercises
  • Due by 23:59 on Friday of weeks 3, 5, 9 and 11 on Blackboard

• Research project (50%)

  • Final Python/R project demonstrating familiarity with programming concepts and ability to communicate results
  • Due by 23:59 on Friday, 16 December 2022

Assessment criteria

1. ✔️ Code exists
2. ⌚ Code runs and does what it has to do
3. 📜 Code is legible (meaningful naming, comments)
4. ⚙️ Code is modular (no redundacies, use of abstractions)
5. 🏎️ Code is optimized (no needless loops, runs fast)

Marks at Trinity: https://www.tcd.ie/academicregistry/exams/student-guide/

Plagiarism

• Plagiarising computer code is as serious as plagiarising text (see Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.)
• All submitted programming assignments and final project should be done individually;
• You may discuss general approaches to solutions with your peers;
• But do not share or view each others code;
• You can use online resources but give credit in the comments.

Check the Trinity's guide on the levels and consequences of plagiarism

---

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.