Teaching Intro to Computer Science in Python 3

In this lesson, students are introduced to coding with turtle graphics. Students will begin to recognize programs as sequences and groups of commands. Students will learn a few basic commands and then apply them right away by writing their first program.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to the layout of Tracy’s grid world and will learn how to use coordinate pairs to locate Tracy on the coordinate plane. They will add to the list of commands they know and can use to create Tracy graphics.

In this lesson, students will learn how to use the left and right commands in order to move Tracy to more locations on the canvas. They will now have many commands that can be used to have Tracy create more complex graphics.

In this lesson, students are introduced to for loops. They learn how for loops simplify the process of making small changes to a program and help avoid repeating code. For loops are written like this:

for i in range (4):
    // Code to be repeated 4 times

In this lesson, students are introduced to the ability to turn Tracy at any angle. With this feature, Tracy can now draw diagonal lines which opens up the possibility to draw multiple shapes that weren?t previously available.

In this lesson, students learn how to use comments to describe their programs. Comments are helpful because they allow programmers to leave notes about the programs they are writing. Students will also learn about the different types of comments that can be used and the benefits of using them.

In this short lesson, students will be introduced to the rules for naming elements in their code. Variables and functions that are used inside their programs will be named by students, so the following guidelines should be obeyed to be sure that the programs written are readable and successful.

In this lesson, students are introduced to functions. They start with the basics of defining a function and why we need them and will revisit a program they coded earlier in the unit to rewrite it using functions.

In this lesson, students are able to add some flair to their turtle graphics programs by controlling color, pensize, and fill. These new commands are added to the list of commands that have been already practiced in order to allow for more creativity in student programs.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the concept of Top Down Design. Top Down Design is the process of breaking down a program into functions or smaller parts to avoid repeated code and to make our programs more readable.

In this lesson, you?ll learn how to make the most basic python program, one that displays texts on the screen. When you run these programs, you?ll see text appear on the console screen. You will learn how to print in python using the print statement. You will also learn how to use quotations, apostrophes, and strings.

In this video, students will learn about a fundamental aspect of every programming language: Variables. A variable is something that stores information in a program that you can use later. More specifically, a variable has 3 things: a name, type, and value. One of the variables students will be presented is Greeting.

In this lesson, we cover user input. We learn how to request user input as both strings and integers, we learn where the input is stored, and we learn how to convert strings and integers. By converting strings to integers, students can incorporate their knowledge from the previous lesson (Mathematical Operators) with this lesson on user input.

In this lesson, students will learn about using mathematical operators in their Python programs. They will work through multiple examples to get comfortable with operator precedence and using different types of operators.

In this lesson, students will be able to perform string operations in order to concatenate values together.

In this lesson we will discuss what is a Boolean and go over examples.

In this lesson we will learn how to use If and If-Else Statements; these statements allow you to use conditions to determine how your code should run.

In this lesson, students will dive into comparison operators. Comparison operators give the ability to compare two values. Using comparison operators in programming is similar to math in that less than <, greater than >, less than or equal to <=, and greater than or equal to >= are the same. The differences are that operators for equal to are == and not equal are !=. Using comparison operators allow programs to make decisions.

In this lesson, students will look at logical operators. Logical operators give the ability to connect or modify Boolean expressions. Three logical operators are NOT (!), or and and. These logical operators can be used in combination. With these logical operators, logical statements can be constructed, such as ?I go to sleep when I am tired OR it?s after 9pm?, ?I wear flip flops when I am outside AND it is NOT raining?.

• While loops allow code to be executed repeatedly based on a condition.
• It might be helpful to think of while loops as a repeating if statement.
• Infinite loops are created if the exit condition of the while loop is never met, causing the code inside the while loop to repeat continuously.

In this lesson, students will explore how to use for loops in their Python programs. They will be reminded how to use i as a variable in their programs as well as how to control the values of i by altering the starting, ending, and interval values.

In this lesson, students learn about break and continue statements. A break statement is used to immediately terminates a loop. A continue statement is used to skip out of future commands inside a loop and return back to the top of the loop. These statements can be used with for or while loops.

• When we use control structures within control structures, we refer to them as nested control structures.
• When using a for loop within a for loop, we need to be careful to create a second variable to index on.
• The inner loop will run to completion every time the outer loop runs.

In this lesson, we learn about Functions. Functions let us break our program into different parts that we can organize and reuse however we like. Functions are the main building block of complex Python programs.

In this lesson, we dive deeper into the concept of functions by exploring how to use parameters.

In this lesson, we explore where variables exist and what the difference is between a local and global variable.

In this lesson, students explore functions with return values and deepen their understanding of and ability to use functions.

In this lesson, students explore Python’s way of handling errors with exceptions.

Students will learn how indexing can be used to specify a specific character in a string based on location.

Students will learn how slicing allows them to select multiple string values at once from a given string.

In this lesson, students will look at the use of for loops with strings. Since both string indices and for loops index at zero, the len value can be used to go through strings in a for loop. Indicies don’t need to be explicitly used. The syntax for character in my_string can be used to go through a for loop one character at a time.

In this lesson, students will see how the in keyword can be used in an if statement to see if a particular letter or substring is in a string.

In this lesson, students will learn about string methods. Methods are basically functions that you call on objects and can be used to alter our strings in different ways.

In this lesson, students will learn about and practice using tuples. A tuple is a heterogenous, immutable data type that stores an ordered sequence of things that can be accessed using indices.

In this lesson, students will learn about their second data structure, lists. A list is a mutable, heterogeneous data type that stores an ordered sequence of things.

In this lesson, students will learn how lists can be iterated over in a similar way to strings.

Methods, in general, are like functions that can be called on objects. Students have seen previously how string methods are called on strings. In this lesson, students will learn about the various list methods that can be called on lists!