A workshop was conducted at MRIIC as part of its Faculty Development Program (FDP) by Dr. Umesh Dutta (Director, MRIIC) on Python Language ad the fundamental concepts associated with computer programming. The workshop was attended by faculties from the Department of Mathematics, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in MRIIRS along with students from the same Departments.
The workshop started with an introduction to Python as a programming language and the wide range of applications that it can be used for. The participants were familiarized with the Visual Studio Code as an Integrated Development Environment for writing and editing codes. The ‘print()’ command for printing statements was introduced along with its syntax. Dr. Umesh Dutta introduced a simple way of taking user input using the ‘input()’ function. Certain programming concepts associated with the input() function like default input type of ’str’ and typecasting were key takeaways from this section.
Further, a simple program to make a calculator which can perform mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division from the input provided by the user was executed by the participants. The concept of conditional statement if-else was introduced and applied to the developed calculator program to make it more user-friendly. Further information was given on the syntax and use-case of other conditional statements like for loop and while loop which was applied in a program to display individual digits of a user-entered number.
The participants were given a chance to practice their newly learned skills by writing a python program that can give the sum of the digits of any number entered by the user. Also, a module in python named ‘math’ was introduced to perform functions like sqrt() and degrees().
The participants performed GUI programming using Tkinter module and plotted data using the Matplotlib library. They were also informed the concepts of JSON for API handling.
Through this workshop, the participants were able to comprehend fundamental python codes and understand the essential concepts involved in writing their own programs. They were glad to be introduced to this new skill and looked forward to another Expert level course in the upcoming months.