Workshop Kickoff

Welcome to Python Power Hour! Over the next 80 minutes you'll go from "never written a line of code" to "okay, Python is actually kind of cool." We'll cover the essentials, build something that runs, and leave you with enough to keep going if you want to.

What Python is actually used for

Python shows up in a wide range of fields:

• Data science and AI (TensorFlow, PyTorch, and most ML libraries are Python-first)
• Web development (Django and Flask power real production sites)
• Automation (scripting repetitive tasks, scraping web pages, moving files around)
• Scientific research (biologists, physicists, and economists all reach for Python when they need to crunch numbers)
• Simple games (Pygame)

You don't need to care about any of these today. But Python being useful in all of them is a decent reason to learn it.

Workshop Standards

Three house rules:

1. Try before you ask. Re-read the instruction. Look at your code. Nine times out of ten the answer is in front of you.
2. Ask a neighbour before an instructor. Your classmates are your first debugging resource.
3. Errors are normal. Every programmer sees error messages constantly — they're not a sign something is wrong with you, just something wrong with the code.

Google Colab

Today for our workshop we'll be using Google Colab to run our python code in the browser. Colab runs Python in the browser, so there's nothing to install.