This looks like an excellent class, and fills a very important educational niche. We taught something vaguely similar a couple of years ago geared towards molecular biologists and clinical researchers, and it turned out to be extremely popular. Most of our students had less than zero programming experience, and pretty much all of them were able to put what they learned to practical use. The point of the class was teach them just enough, about enough different things, to get a feel for what sorts of problems could be easily tackled programmatically.

For example, one student realized part-way through the class that she could write a script to automatically process the lengthy and complex output of a particular laboratory instrument instead of doing it by hand, and by the end of the class was able to not only write that script but modify and extend it to deal with a slightly different model of the same instrument. Other students figured out that Python was easier to use than SAS for some types of data reformatting and analysis. Nothing fancy, just the sort of day-to-day hacking that we all take completely for granted- but it's incredibly useful for working scientists to be able to do that sort of thing for themselves, and courses like this one give them a real leg up.

It looks like the UNH course had some really great content- seriously, check it out or send a link to your scientist buddies.