Programming is a big challenge for many students at the TUW. Especially those who previously attended an AHS are often overwhelmed at the beginning of their studies and even HTL graduates do not always have previous programming knowledge. But the situation is also difficult for course instructors: On the one hand, there are students who have no prior knowledge, and on the other hand, there are those who already know the content from school.

To address this disparity, we developed an online course in the context of a TUW internal .dcall project "JaaS MOOC", which enables students with no prior programming knowledge to independently learn the basics of programming in the Python programming language. To make the course interesting for as many students at TUW as possible, we combined theoretical chapters with interactive examples and small programming tasks from different scientific fields. We cooperated with colleagues from computer science (Stefan Podlipnig), chemistry (Dennis Svatunek) and mechanical engineering (Alexander Synek and Sebastian Bachmann).

Only if as many students as possible at the TUW know about this course and use it, we can achieve the greatest possible added value for teaching at the TUW. If you are in the situation described above, you are invited to take a look at the course yourself and to make your students aware of it. If you are interested in integrating practice- relevant examples for your respective study/research area, please contact Gottfried Mandlburger (gottfried.mandlburger@geo.tuwien.ac.at) or Katharina Riederer (katharina.riederer@geo.tuwien.ac.at). We are also open to any feedback on other questions, ideas or suggestions.

To participate in the course, you can register either at https://edu.tuwien.ac.at/login/index.php, opens an external URL in a new window or via TISS, opens an external URL in a new window to gain access to a TUWEL course.

On Edu you can find the course under "All Courses" --> "Jaas Moocs" --> "Python for Natural Sciences" where you can directly enroll in the course. The course is primarily aimed at Bachelor Students and is currently only available in German. The content of the TUWEL course corresponds to that of the Edu course.

At the end of the semester, you will have the opportunity to voluntarily take a practical final exam and earn one ECTS credit.

We warmly welcome you to dive into the world of programming at any time!
With kind regards Gottfried Mandlburger & Katharina Riederer