Course syllabus
Course-PM
LP3 VT25
DAT446: Fundamentals of program development.
The course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering
Contact details
- examiner and lecturer: Jean-Philippe Bernardy <jean-philippe.bernardy@gu.se>
- Teaching assistants:
| Inari Listenmaa | inari@chalmers.se |
| Wincent Stålbert-Holm | wincenth@chalmers.se |
| Alex Ionescu | ionescua@chalmers.se |
| Niklas Deworetzki | nikdew@chalmers.se |
| Antonina Skurka | skurka@chalmers.se |
| Ekaterina Voloshina | ekavol@chalmers.se |
| Bart van der Steenhoven | bartj@chalmers.se |
| Lucia Lavagnino | luciala@chalmers.se |
| Bibiana Farinha | bibiana.farinha@gmail.com |
| Oluwatosin Omotoyinbo | twisstosin@gmail.com |
| Benjamin Pettersson | benpe@student.chalmers.se |
Student Representatives:
Schedule
The course schedule is available on TimeEdit
The lecture topics, slides, etc. will appear as modules as the course progresses.
Course literature
John M. Zelle, Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science. Franklin, Beedle, & Associates.
In this course we support both the 3rd and 4th edition of the book.
https://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/
The book is also available as e-book
Learning outcomes
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 basic 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.
Content
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.
Organisation
The teaching consists of lectures, group work, exercises, as well as supervision in connection to the exercises.
Examination form
To pass the course it is necessary to do:
- 3 obligatory labs which must be submitted before the deadline and approved by a supervisor. The grading can involve automatic testing, but supervisors also manually inspect the submissions for clarity, correctness and general quality.
- A digital exam. Permitted aids: one handwritten A4 sheet.