Summer-Winter School (02.2023)

Do you want to learn how to code, but do not know where to start? Are you afraid of all that script? Worry not, for we have the solution: the first SICSS Summer-Winter School. In the school, students from social and environmental sciences got from zero-coding to amazing projects in two weeks of hybrid, inductive and hands-on learning.

This first iteration of the international SICSS Summer-Winter School took place between February 6th and 17th, when it was summer in Brazil, and winter in Germany (hence the school’s name). In a truly hybrid environment, we had students, teachers and tutors in our classrooms in Hamburg, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre along with online participation from several cities in Germany and Brazil. The school integrated daily lectures and keynotes with hands-on exercises in online coding platforms like Replit and DataCamp. In this way, we provided critical thinking and purpose, technical skills, and room for experimentation to our students to explore the question "How does programming for academic purposes work using the Python computer language for increasing sustainability?"

The results were incredible! As a final task, the students submitted their entries for an internal competition, which awarded the winners with support for travelling to Hamburg or São Paulo, extending the exchange further. Looking back, we can say that the Summer-Winter School was a total success. The students and their extraordinary projects have shown that even without prior knowledge and in such a short time, the modeling of complex human-environmental interrelations can succeed and provide important research insights.

Below, you have a preview of these amazing projects, with their code, results, and data available for anyone to check, learn from, and validate.