Scientists and engineers are often confronted with time-consuming and repetitive tasks when processing and analyzing data, namely collecting information from websites, converting files from one format to another, and analyzing, summarizing and visualizing the information obtained. In addition, the exponential flow of newly incoming information requires present-day scientists and engineers to be able to automate these tasks, in order to speed up their daily job routines. This course teaches you how to translate these time-consuming and repetitive tasks in such a way that they can be performed automatically by a computer. To that end, the necessary skills for computer-based creative problem solving will be acquired through learning to work and think in Python, a popular programming language, and in UNIX, the workhorse operating system of science and engineering. The programming problems that need to be solved are taken from different scientific disciplines, including mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, and computer science. In order to attend this course, students do not need to have any prior programming experience. However, in order to be successful for this course, students need to have an aptitude for mathematics and logic. In addition, given that this course follows a ‘learning by doing’ and a ‘learning from mistakes’ approach, students need to have a willingness to solve programming problems on a weekly basis.