Welcome to CS9 #

The CS9 course is the introductory course to computer science. It is comprised of three modular units. Each unit is standalone and be taught outside of the context of the entire course.

For each unit, we reccomend working through labs in order as it assumes knowledge from the previous labs. However, if you are confident in the content, each lab also works as a standalone entity.

Unit 00: Drawing ↕

This initial unit prioritizes getting students making personally-meaningful things as fast as possible. This means we aren’t aiming for completeness. In particular, we’re not introducing data structures in this unit; most students won’t need them, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them in the next unit.

Working within the context of drawing, students practice building up complex programs from simple ones. We’ll use Python’s turtle library. Loosely inspired by Chris’s Python drawing unit from GMS.

Programming:

Imperative programming
Basics of syntax
Control flow: sequences, loops, conditionals, functions
Levels of abstraction: functions, modules
Decomposition and code reuse.

Unit 01: Data Science ↕

Programming: Introduction to functional programming; abstraction. Types: int, float, bool. Introduction to data structures. Iterating over lists. Students will build on code reuse from unit 1, this time writing functions without side effects that can be composed. Curriculum: Based on introductory unit from BJC.

Unit 02: Games ↕

Games and other interactive media are some of the most important texts of the digital age. We will play and discuss several games, discussing how they work technically and drawing on theoretical perspectives to talk about how they create meaningful experiences for the player. Programming: prototyping, decomposition of larger problems, incremental & iterative development of larger projects.

Games and other interactive media are some of the most important texts of the digital age. We will play and discuss several games, discussing how they work technically and drawing on theoretical perspectives to talk about how they create meaningful experiences for the player. Through the framework of games, we will introduce object oriented programming.