10. A workshop on programming by yourself (!)

Motivation

Here’s how I announce this mini-course to the mailing list:

This week on [...] I will teach a mini-course in which we practice
writing programs ourselves.  Most of our mini-courses involve a
program which I or one of the other students have written, but it's
important to break that umbilical cord and actually carry out some
exercises or write some programs from scratch.  So this week we will
do that: I will propose a program to write, but you can also pick
any program to work on, or exercise from the book.  You will work on
it on your own, but I will occasionally give tips, either to
individuals or to the whole class. [...]

Plan

I start out by proposing a problem. The one I have used gives some exposure to chemistry and an opportunity to explain some ideas.