Goals and Schedule

Program Goals

The Academy serves as a launchpad for your future in engineering. Our mission is to provide a rigorous, interactive deep-dive into the technical skills and mindsets required by the next generation of engineers. A central feature of the Academy is our intensive python coding camp—an immersive deep-dive into the language and its applications to current engineering topics such as autonomous driving, neural networks and machine learning, and large language models (LLMs).

Sessions

	Week 1	Week 2
Session	July 6 - July 10	July 13 - July 17

Schedule

Class hours will be in person from 9AM – 3PM (PST)

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5
9 - 10:30 AM	Introduction to Python Programming	Iterable Variables	Functions	Hashing	Numpy II
10:30-11AM	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A
11-12:30PM	Basic Python Variables	Conditions and Loops	Classes and OOP	Numpy I	Scientific Visualization
12:30-1:30PM	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break
1:30-3PM	Python Setup and Exercises	Debugging and Exercises	Coding Exercises	Coding Exercises	Coding Exercises

	Day 6	Day 7	Day 8	Day 9	Day 10
9 - 10:30 AM	Gradient Descent	Deep Neural Networks	Introduction to Autonomous Driving	Reinforcement Learning	Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) I
10:30-11AM	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A	Q&A
11-12:30PM	Introduction to Machine Learning	Convolutional Neural Networks	PID Control for Lane following	Reinforcement Learning II	GPT II
12:30-1:30PM	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break	Lunch Break
1:30-3PM	Coding Exercises	Coding Exercises	Simulation: Racing Practice	Simulation: Racing Practice	Making GPT your co-pilot

Requirements

Students are expected to have sufficient background on basic computer programming in the Python language. The curriculum has built in a quick refresher of Python programming at the beginning with additional exercises and debugging practice, but the course is NOT suitable for students who have never learned about Python in the past.