Course syllabus for Fundamentals of program development

Knowledge and understanding:

• Grasp the relation between source code, the interpreter, and the machine.
• Choose appropriate data types and data structures for different kinds of data, depending on their performance characteristics.
• Design algorithms to solve simple programming problems.

Competence and skill:

• Structure small programs by the use of concepts such as iterations, functions, modules, classes, and methods.
• Structure larger programs into manageable and reusable units.
• Form readable, descriptive and well-documented program code.
• Use programming for basic data analysis involving large textual or numeric files.
• Express mathematical formulas as programming language expressions and algorithms.
• Build interactive programs with text-based and graphical user interfaces.
• Test programs, for instance using unit testing.
• Use programming tools such as text editor, command line interface, and IDE (integrated development environment).
• Use standard libraries and follow best programming practices.

Judgement and approach:

• Assess the difficulty and resources needed for typical programming tasks.

The course is a first introduction to programming by using the general-purpose programming language Python. It gives a comprehensive knowledge of the language, enabling the student to write code for a wide variety of tasks and to read and reuse code written by other programmers.

• Literals, types, variables, declarations, initialization, operators, expressions and statements, scope.
• Control statements: if, while, for, break, continue, return, try, raise.
• Exceptions and exception handling.
• Functions, parameters, arguments, method calls, local variables.
• Classes, objects, instance and class variables/methods.
• Simple data structures (list, dictionary, set, stack).
• One- and two-dimensional lists.
• Input and output.
• Introduction to graphical interfaces.
• Overview of file handling.
• Text handling, strings.