CSC 221: Introduction to Programming
Fall 2012

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE overview & history: hardware vs. software, technology generations, ... problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, communiation skills SCRATCH PROGRAMMING simple, visual introduction to programming concepts actions (e.g., move), conditionals, loops, event-handlers, variables simple object interaction via sensing and broadcasts introduction to object-oriented concepts sprites = objects, sprite properties = fields, script blocks = methods PYTHON LANGUAGE FEATURES variables: basic data types: numbers, strings, Booleans naming conventions, assignment statements, expressions functions def, parameters, return statements, doc strings built-in functions (print, abs, max, min), importing modules (random, math) conditional execution if statement, Boolean operators (<, <=, >, >=, ==, !=, and or, not) if (1-way), if-else (2-way), cascading if-else, elif (multi-way) repetition for loops, counter/range-driven while loops, condition-driven sequences common operations/functions: +, *, len, indexing, slicing traversal: by item, by index strings (sequences of characters, immutable) methods: isalpha, capitalize, upper, strip, find, replace, ... examples: palindrome, Caesar cipher, Pig Latin lists (sequences of arbitrary items, mutable) methods: count, index, sort, append, extend, insert, remove, ... list comprehensions examples: list of words, row of cards, 2-D grid of pixels classes/objects class definition, fields, methods, self special methods: __init__, __str__ examples: Die, DeckOfCards, RowOfCards, Image PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES conditionals for alternatives e.g., recognize doubles, recognize a vowel, distinguish Skip-3 commands loops for repetition (conditional while loops, range-driven for loops) counters & sums for collecting data e.g., roll dice until doubles, count number of vowels, play until "quit" String traversal/concatenation for manipulating text e.g., construct acronym, encode a message, get avg word length input for user input; read/readline/write for files e.g., interactive Skip-3, reading text from a file & splitting into words lists for storing and accessing arbitrary data e.g., words from a line of text, cards in a deck, pixels in an image object-oriented design classes model real-world entities; objects are instances of those classes fields maintain state of an object; methods implement behaviors e.g., RowOfCards models a row of cards field (list of cards), methods (addAtEnd, moveCard, numCards, ...)