WEEK 1: Python and Jupyter
Payton B -
This week, My main focus was to learn to code. The research that we are doing is very dependent on code. We have a code set up for us to analyze data and we are currently trying to work out any issues with this code. Since I have no coding background, my focus for this week was to begin to learn to code. I enrolled in a free online coding class and began to learn Python. I learned about variables, arrays, and loops as well as what they are, why they are useful, and how to use them. This is where my first problem arose. For the purpose of this project, I needed to learn to code in Python, specifically in Jupyter Notebook. The free course I enrolled in, however, was not taught in Jupyter Notebook. For the most part, it was the same, but there were some minor differences. One of which was figuring out how to get a graph to appear. I had all of the data set up but the graph wouldn’t appear. Most of my time for this week ended up being figuring out how to get this graph to appear. That is until I asked one of my mentors, Becca, for help. She fixed it in 5 minutes.
Outside of just research, I also got to have a bit of fun with my mentor, Dr. Richardson. On Wednesday, he invited me to sit in on a class that he was teaching in the Embry Riddle planetarium. It was a lecture on celestial coordinate systems, constellations, and mythology. As a fan of mythology, I would have expected that part of the lecture to be what I found most interesting, but he also taught us how to find the northern star, Polaris. Now, I will never get lost again.
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