Python I

In our first class, students will download a program called MuCode, which is a helpful (and free) code editor. MuCode comes with a suite of essential features and an easy-to-use interface that makes it a perfect first-step for new programmers.

Students then see how Python works with their computer and take their first step towards coding by printing text to their device's screen, doing some simple math, and learning about the importance of code comments.

The course will build on the program we start on Day 1. The end goal of this course is for students to create their own program by the end of the last class.

By the end of Day 1, students will have written a functional computer program (hooray!). Now, they'll explore one of the fundamental concepts in programming: variables. Students will learn what variables are, how to use them, and how to manipulate them for their program's needs.

Variables, as you can probably guess, vary in what they contain, so students will also learn some different data types that Python employs, like integers, strings, and booleans.

On Day 3, students explore a rather philosophical question; can our program make a decision all on its own? As it turns out, yes it can!

…sort of.

While it won't be any kind of Artificial Intelligence, students learn how to work with “if” and “else” statements to let the program decide what to do based on certain conditions. For this lesson, these conditions will be based on comparison operators, such as "less than" (<), "greater than" (>), "less than or equal to" (<=), etc.

On Day 4, students learn about more operators such as “AND”, “OR”, “NOT”, and modulo operators to add further logic to our conditional statements. They will also learn about “for” and “while” loops, which are important operators that allow the program to repeat certain sequences based on a desired criteria (these will be discussed in much more detail in the next class).

On Day 5, students continue exploring loops by introducing the range function (we'll cover functions on day 7!), which simply returns a sequence of numbers in a specified range. While it has other uses, students will use to it dictate how many times our loops will run. They also learn how to use loops with another fundamental data type in Python: Lists. Students will discover how to create and dynamically modify these lists with indexing and various functions.

Strings have come up before as the text in “quotes” throughout our code. There are many applications of strings (slicing, concatenating, modifying, etc), and they will begin exploring some of them in this class.

But strings that we make ourselves are boring *yawn*. It is more fun if the program prompts the user to enter something, and save that input as a string in our code. Students will learn to implement it in this class.

Throughout the course so far, students have used a lot of standard Python functions to complete a variety of tasks. Functions are an invaluable tool in our arsenal for efficiency and re-usability, and this lesson will focus on how to create our own. Students will also learn about scope and how it affects the visibility of our variables throughout our program.

Anything the students want to ask or discuss, this is the time to do it. We'll go over everything we've learned once more and iron out any gaps in knowledge. Additionally, we'll discuss the concept of importing modules, and work with the frequently used random module.

We'll also run a small multiple choice quiz on Kahoot!

For this class, we'll provide the students with a scenario and ask them to make a program to fulfill some tasks. All things they've learned will be incorporated into their code. They can consult any resources and ask anything they need. Once completed, they can proudly call themselves programmers and take pride in their ability to apply newly learned programming skills to real world scenarios!