This spring I am teaching my first course! It is a pretty small seminar, 8-10 graduate students, but they all seem excited about the material. It is a “Programming for Political Scientists” course that will use Python to both teach people how to write good software as well as show them how people are using software in the discipline currently. I hope to spend the first half of the course covering basic software engineering and computer science concepts before moving on to some specific applications. Hopefully, by the end of the course all of the students will have built something that they can use to further their research agendas (e.g. a web scraper to supplement a data set).

The class website is up at http://joshcutler.github.com/PS398/ where you can find my schedule outline as well as the homeworks. One thing that has worked well so far was requiring that everyone work through Zed Shaw‘s Learn Python the Hard Way before class. This got everyone (note that most had not done any serious programming before) on the same page and ready to start tackling some more advanced ideas.

For those of you that have experience in the space, I would welcome any feedback on the syllabus (or anything else). As the course moves along I will try to post about any changes that I make, findings, etc. for those interested in teaching a similar course elsewhere.