This course is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python programming language.
The objective of CS101 is to teach programming skills and computational thinking. The first is important because programming is needed in all areas of science and engineering, although very different programming languages are used. The second is perhaps even more important, as it influences how you go about solving a problem. 50 years ago, the solution to a problem in mathematics or engineering was often a formula. Today, it is usually an algorithm.
Starting from spring 2010, CS101 uses the programming language Python, a language that was designed to be easy to learn. Python is used by many universities world-wide for teaching introductory programming. It is free, open-source, and multi-platform.
Python is not a toy. Python is the basis for much of the programming at Google (for instance, Python is the original and main framework for the Google App Engine platform). Python is used intensively in numerical computations, for instance at NASA. The numerical Python library supports vectorization and is widely used in scientific computation. Python is also the language of choice for writing user interfaces for applications on high-end Nokia phones. Large portions of games (such as Civilization IV) are written in Python. Python is becoming the language of choice in mathematics, used for instance by graph algorithm libraries, or the open-source mathematics software system Sage (an open-source competitor to Maple or Mathematica).
CS101 consists of 12 sections of about 40 students each. Each section meets once a week for a three-hour lab session supervised by a lead TA (a Ph.D. student), with some helper TA's around (undergraduate and master students). Four sections take one lecture together, which is once a week for 75 minutes.
Students need to attend the lab session every week. One of the tasks done during the lab has to be marked off by a TA, so that we know that you were there and did your best.
There will also be about four take-home homeworks where you have to program slightly more complex tasks.
Lab sessions will introduce students to pair programming.
This webpage contains the syllabus, lecture notes, and slides for CS101, and links to all the software you need in the labs (or to do the lab tasks on your own computer).
All other information, such as lecturers, TAs, lecture and lab times, homeworks, exams, and the bulletin boards can be found on the comprehensive CS101 website cs101.kaist.ac.kr.
If you decide to major in an engineering area such as computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or industrial engineering, you will need to learn C++ (for computer science) or at least C. You may also want to learn Java.
We will offer some short introduction to C during this course. Having learnt to program well in Python, this will be rather easy to do. (In fact, we believe that after having learnt the fundamentals well in Python, you will be a better C programmer than if you started learning to program in C.)
To further study C, C++, or Java, you could study those languages either by yourself, or by taking a course at the KAIST IT Academy. The CS department is also thinking about offering a 1-credit course teaching C++ programming in the winter break 2010/2011.
CS101 will use only freely available material:
This free book is nearly identical to Python for Software Design by Allen B. Downey, Cambridge University Press. If you would like to have a real printed book, then buy this book!
Robot lecture notes
I wrote these
lecture notes to be used together with cs1robots.py based on
the lessons for RUR-PLE by André
Roberge.
Photo processing lecture notes
Lecture notes to be used with cs1media.py.
Tutorial for cs1graphics
(The original is here.)
The slides used in the lectures will also be available online.
We will make use of the following freely available software: Python 2.6, Wing IDE 101, Python Imaging Library (PIL), cs1graphics.py, cs1robots.py, and cs1media.py.
A copy of all necessary software and installation instructions will be available in the instructions for Lab 1.
Here is a rough list of what we will cover in each week of the semester.
| Lecture | Lab session | |
| Week 1 | Course Introduction; Why learn programming? What is computational thinking? Algorithms | No lab |
| Week 2 | Syntax, functions, for-loops, first objects | Install software, programming with robots: (basic Python syntax, for-loops) |
| Week 3 | Conditionals, while-loops | More programming with robots (Conditionals, while-loops) |
| Week 4 | Variables, basic data types | Basic Python objects (numbers, strings, lists) |
| Week 5 | Objects, garbage collection | Create graphical display (practice objects and basic data types) |
| Week 6 | Lists and loops | Animated graphics (practice loops) |
| Week 7 | Images | Image processing (practice loops and numerical computations ) |
| Week 8 | Midterm exam | No lab |
| Week 9 | Comparison of Python and C syntax | More image processing |
| Week 10 | Strings and text files | Process text data from the web (practice working with strings) |
| Week 11 | Dictionaries | Text analysis (practice working with strings and dictionaries) |
| Week 12 | User-defined objects | Parameterized graphical objects |
| Week 13 | Exceptions | Numeric integration |
| Week 14 | Programming in C | First programs in C |
| Week 15 | Programming in C | C programming |
| Week 16 | Final Exam | No lab |
Some useful materials:
This book was written by lecturers at the University of Toronto when they switched their introductory programming course to Python. It is targeted to computer science students and we will not cover the second half of the book at all. But this is a good book for learning more about Python and computer science, and it is inexpensive.
This book was written for the revised introductory programming course at Georgia Tech. It teaches programming by solving problems related to computational media, that is processing images and sound. If you are interested in media computing, then this is a good book to study. However, the code examples require Jython, an implementation of Python in Java, which we will not be using, and the book is ridiculuously expensive.
The book is available as an e-Book in PDF. Also, if one buys the paper copy, one can download the PDF version for free. This book teaches programming in Python to kids. If you find our CS101 course too hard, you may like this casual and gentle introduction (with lots of cartoons).