From Prompting to Programming: Coding Your Own Water Solutions
Don’t just use AI tools—build them. While no-code frameworks are powerful, Python is the industry standard for deep data science and custom automation. This bootcamp is designed for the water professional who wants to learn to code without the years-long learning curve.
By using AI as your "Pair Programmer," you will learn to write, debug, and deploy Python scripts that handle complex water data. You will take a project you previously built in a no-code environment and "rebuild it under the hood" to gain total control over your digital workflows.
The Curriculum: Coding with a Digital Mentor
- The AI-Assisted Coder: How to use LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to write Python code safely. Learn to identify "hallucinations" and use sources like Stack Overflow to verify AI-generated logic.
- Professional Environment Setup: Getting started with Anaconda (Conda) for local development and Google CoLab for cloud-based collaboration.
- Core Python for Water: Master the fundamentals of variables, loops, and data structures through the lens of environmental engineering.
- Refactoring No-Code to Pro-Code: Rebuilding your previous projects in Python to unlock advanced customization and scalability.
- The QA Framework: How to use AI to find bugs, optimize your code, and perform Quality Assurance on complex engineering calculations.
The Build Lab: The Pair-Programming Experience
We continue our 50/50 Model to ensure you walk away with a functional prototype:
- Weeks 1-2: Daily 1-hour "Code-Alongs" followed by 1-hour "Lab Sessions" where you build your custom Python script.
- The Capstone: Presenting your custom-coded water tool and the logic behind it.
Workshop Details
- Duration: 2 Weeks (Monday–Friday)
- Commitment: 2 Hours Per Day (1 hour teaching | 1 hour building)
- Final Output: A capstone project presentation of your custom AI solution
- A certificate of completion to share with your manager and professional network
- Early access to the Ecoformatics platform with recordings from this workshop and other courses as well as a community of water innovators for 3 months after the course ends
Meet your instructor
Gayathri Gopalakrishnan, PhD is an award-winning scientist, engineer and entrepreneur who has been pioneering the integration of AI in water, agriculture, energy and climate since 2003. She has worked in multi-billion dollar organizations including Facebook and Argonne National Laboratory as well as several clean tech startups.
As a scientist, she has been recognized by the US National Academies of Science and Engineering for innovative environmental research and she was invited by the Obama White House to participate in the first conference on innovation in clean technology and big data.
As an engineer and technical leader, she has led teams translating complex R&D into commercial products supporting $10M+ in revenue. Recently, as the Director of Science at Regrow Ag, she led the development of AI systems for digital twins that scaled 40x across 18 countries and led to 36x efficiency gains.
She received her PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her Bachelors in Civil Engineering from BITS Pilani, India
The courses are really useful and easy to follow. It's a 2-for-1 in understanding which tools to learn and which to brush up which makes it easy to upskill at my job or find a new one.
Mary, Environmental Scientist
The instructor is very friendly and knows her subject! The course helped me get comfortable using and building data science models at my job.
Karen A., Water Manager and Data Analyst
I found the material very informative and interesting. It was a fascinating introduction to the applications of data science in clean technology
Ganesh, Data Scientist