EGR 103/Concept List/F23

Lecture 1 - 8/28 - Course Introduction

• Main class page: EGR 103L
  • Includes links to Canvas, Pundit, and Ed pages
• Sakai page: Canvas103L page; grades, surveys and tests, some assignment submissions; first day slideshow in Resources section goes over everything else.
• For next Friday's class:
  • Log in at Coursera at Duke
  • Watch video on Developing an Algorithm
  • Watch video on A Seven Step Approach to Solving Programming Problems
  • See Seven steps of programming The Seven Steps Poster.

Lecture 2 - 9/1 - Introduction to Programming

• Seven steps of programming The Seven Steps Poster
  • Watch video on Developing an Algorithm
  • Watch video on A Seven Step Approach to Solving Programming Problems
• Almost all languages have input, output, math, conditional execution (decisions), and repetition (loops)
• Problem: Consider how to decide if a number is a prime number
  • Some "shortcuts" for specific factors (2, 3, and 5, for example) but need to have a generalized approach
  • See if number is evenly divisible by any integer between 2 and the square root of the number - but how do we ask the computer to do that?
  • We can use output to get the computer to ask for a number and we can use input to allow the computer to receive that number

We can use math and the mod operator (%) to see if one number is evenly divisible by another, a loop to go through all possible relevant divisors, and a decision structure to choose what to do if we determine that a number is not prime.

• Very quick tour of Python with Spyder
  • Console (with history tab), info box (with variable explorer, files, and other tabs), and editing window
  • Pushing "play" button or hitting F5 will save the script, change the working directory, and run the script
  • Quick introduction to variable types: int, float, str
  • Quick introduction to indexing: Python is "0" indexed, meaning if there is a collection of items called x, x[0] will be the "first" item in the collection and x[N-1] where N is the total number of items will be the last item. Also, reverse indexing, where x[-1] is the last item and x[-N] is the first item.