Course syllabus

DAT456: Introduction to programming in Python.

LP3-4 VT25

The course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering

Contact details

Wincent Stålbert-Holm wincenth@chalmers.se
Hugo Johansson hugjoha@chalmers.se
Jakob Grevle jakob@grevle.se
Sam Ebrahimi sam.ebrahimi@live.se
Muhammad Abdullah Arshad abdullaharshad171@gmail.com
Jakob Backhaus jakobba@chalmers.se
Ida Thorburn ida.thorburn@gmail.com
Shariq Ali gusalishb@student.gu.se
Oscar Eliasson racso03oe@gmail.com
Kusai Al Malt kusai@student.chalmers.se
Yihuai Cai yihuai@chalmers.se
Zhen Tian gustiazh@student.gu.se
  • Student Representatives: TBA

Schedule

The teaching consists of lectures, exercises, as well as supervision in connection to the exercises.

This course is run remotely, between week 4 and week 24. The course schedule is available on TimeEdit.

Weekly* remote learning

  • One lecture on Tuesday 6pm–7pm.
  • Two consultation sessions:
    • Tuesday 7pm–8pm (right after lecture)
    • Thursday 6pm–7pm

(*) No lectures during public holidays or Chalmers exam weeks. On exam weeks, there may be consultations even when there is no lecture. Check the course calendar to make sure.

Obligatory on-campus meetings

  1. A workshop of 3 hours, on either April 8, 9 or 10. Each day there are 14 slots (of max 6 students each), and you need to sign up for one of them via People/Groups.
  2. A final exam, on June 12 (8:30 to 12:30)

The lecture topics, slides, etc. will appear as modules as the course progresses.

Examination form

To pass the course it is necessary to do:

  • attend the mid course workshop
  • obligatory lab which must be submitted before the deadline (May 9) 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.

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.

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.
  • Simple data structures (list, dictionary, set, stack).
  • One- and two-dimensional lists.
  • Input and output.
  • Overview of file handling.
  • Text handling, strings.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.