What motivates someone to learn how to code as a scientist? How do you harness the excitement of solving problems quickly and make the connection to the benefits of coding in your scientific work? This week on the show, we speak with Ben Lear and Christopher Johnson about their book “Coding For Chemists.”

Christopher is an associate professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University. Ben is a professor of chemistry at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science. They’re long-time friends who decided to collaborate on a book after discussing the challenges of teaching coding to chemistry students.

The book targets chemists and other researchers who want to streamline common workflows with Python. It covers core Python concepts, data visualization, and data analysis topics by sharing common problems encountered in chemical research and presenting a complete Python-based solution for each problem.

We discuss how they collaborated on the book and decided what libraries and tools to include. We cover how LLM tools have affected classroom teaching and require new techniques to reinforce learning. We also dig into what motivates students to learn how to code.

Course Spotlight: Defining Python Functions With Optional Arguments

In this video course, you’ll learn about Python optional arguments and how to define functions with default values. You’ll also learn how to create functions that accept any number of arguments using args and kwargs.

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