Episodes
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Explore the nature of programming and how programming a computer is different than using a computer.
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In this lecture we learn abut how the computer processes and stores programs. We learn about the CPU, Memory, Storage and Input / Output devices are brought together to write a program.
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We look at how writing programs is just another form of communication. Instead of communicating with another person, we are communicating our ideas to a computer.
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We look at the basics of the Python language and how we write code in Python to communicate sequential steps, conditional steps and repeated steps.
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We look at Python's reserved words, how we name and use variables, why we choose meaningful (mnemonic) variable names and how assignment statements function.
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We look at how we use various numerical and string operations to compute new information and store the new values in variables.
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The most basic conditional structure is the if statement where we either execute or skip a segment of code based on the results of a logical expression (i.e. asking a question).
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In this lecture we look at multi-branch if statements and the try-except concept where we can indicate a group of statements to be executed if something goes wrong with a block of statements.
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We look at how code flows into and out of functions as well has how we pass information into functions and get results returned to us.
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We look at how to build our own functions using parameters and arguments as well as how we return results to the code that is calling our functions.
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We look at how we construct a loop so that it runs as long as we want it to run. We learn about iteration variables and exiting loops with the 'break' and 'continue' statements.
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We learn how to use the 'for' statement in Python to loop through a set of data.
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Loops have a beginning, middle, and end. We look ant how we construct a loop to look at a list of items one at a time so we can compute an overall maximum, minimum or average.
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We continue to look at how to construct loops including how to do something special the first time through the loop. We introduce the idea of 'None' which is a way to indicate that a variable is currently empty.
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We learn how to create string variables and extract portions of the data as well as write simple loops to read through the characters in a string.
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We learn how to extract substrings using slicing, and use the string library to perform common data extraction operations with strings.
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We look at how text and lines are represented in files, how we open a file and write a loop to read through all the lines in the file.
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We look at patterns for reading and processing the data in files. We learn how to check for nonexistent files, and how we process each line within the file.
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We learn how to put data into lists, take data out of the list and write simple loops to examine the elements of a list.
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We learn about list slicing, list searching, and using pre-defined functions with lists.
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