🎯 Course Learning Objectives

By the end of CSW 8, students will have discussed, applied, and praciced working with the following course goals.

• Foundational programming concepts:
  • Memory concepts: variables, name, type, value, assignment statements, scope of variables, primitive vs. reference variables
  • Primitive types: int, float, str, bool
  • Basic data structures: lists, tuples, dictionaries, namedtutples, sets
  • Control structures: if/else/elif, for and while loops, nested loops
  • Operations on Lists and Other Data Structures in Python: index vs. value, finding sum, min, max, average, count of elements matching some condition, making a new structure of elements containing only those that match some condition.
  • Functions: function call vs. function definition, formal vs. actual parameters (arguments), recursive functions
  • Input/output concepts: Writing to the terminal, reading from the keyboard, reading and writing to files, neatly formatting output
• Problem solving strategies and code design:
  • breaking down a problem into a sequence of steps
  • abstracting specific problems into general ones, and
  • finding general solutions
• Debugging programs by:
  • predicting the output of programs or parts of code
  • generating test inputs and expected outputs based on the specification of a program, and writing test code
  • using print statements to localize program bugs
• Use an IDE to write and execute code.
• Write code that other people can read and understand.
• Explore the relevance of programming through real-world examples.