• IEEE Quantum Week (QCE20)
• About the workshop
• Complementary sessions
• Workshop program
• Installation and materials
• Organizers

Quantum Curriculum Development
with Microsoft Quantum Development Kit

October 14, 2020 · IEEE Quantum Week 2020 (QCE20) · Denver-Broomfield, CO, USA

About the workshop

Quantum computing has massive implications for workforce development. In addition to working on developing a scalable quantum system, Microsoft partners with universities to help them develop practical quantum curriculum to ensure that we have a trained workforce ready to staff the quantum ecosystem of tomorrow.

This workshop includes:

• A brief overview of Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and Azure Quantum.
• Case study: using the QDK in an undergraduate course “Introduction to quantum computing and quantum programming in Q#” taught by Microsoft Quantum team at the University of Washington.
• Deep dive into the tools and programming assignments developed for the course:
  • The Quantum Katas – tutorials and programming exercises on quantum computing and quantum programming.
  • Automatically graded programming assignments.
  • How to implement a test harness for grading a programming assignment.
  • Alternative types of practical assignments.
• Discussion and brainstorm: the attendees discuss the effectiveness of various quantum programming assignments and brainstorm on creating new practical assignments (new types of assignments and new topics to cover), incorporating them into the existing coursework and developing new curricula around quantum programming.

Complementary sessions

We recommend attending the following sessions:

• Tutorial "Introduction to the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and Azure Quantum" on Tuesday, October 13th.
  This tutorial offers a deeper dive into the tools and libraries included in the Microsoft QDK, as well as a demo of running code on Azure Quantum.
  This tutorial is not a prerequisite for attending the workshop; we will briefly cover the necessary design principles and tools in each section of the workshop.
• Panel "Bringing Quantum Programming into Quantum Computing Education" on Thursday, October 15th.
  In this panel, representatives of different academic institutions will share their perspective on the best practices of teaching quantum computing with an emphasis on quantum programming.

Workshop program

10:45 – 10:50	Welcome
10:50 – 11:10	Overview: Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and Azure Quantum
11:10 – 11:45	Case study: "Introduction to quantum computing and quantum programming in Q#" course at the University of Washington
11:45 – 12:00	Demo: The Quantum Katas - tutorials and programming exercises on quantum computing and quantum programming
12:00 – 12:15	Q&A
12:15 – 13:00	Break
	Deep dive 1: developing automatically graded programming assignments
13:00 – 13:45	Develop a new task end-to-end
13:45 – 14:30	Testing and debugging techniques in Q#
14:30 – 15:15	Break
	Deep dive 2: alternative types of programming assignments
15:15 – 15:35	Hands-on: debugging Q# code
15:35 – 15:50	Automated resource estimation
15:50 – 15:55	Running Q# code on Azure Quantum
15:55 – 16:15	Final projects
16:15 – 16:45	Closing discussion

Installation and materials

The workshop will cover both developing Q# projects in Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code/other text editors and creating Q# Jupyter Notebooks. You will be able to follow the material and do a subset of exercises without installing the QDK locally, with online tools only. However, for the best experience we recommend to install QDK locally following the installation guide for developing Q# projects and the installation guide for Q# Jupyter Notebooks.

You can find the supplementary materials for the workshop in this GitHub repository.

Organizers

• Mark Tsang, Microsoft Corporation, Mark.Tsang@microsoft.com
• Mariia Mykhailova, Microsoft Corporation, mamykhai@microsoft.com