000981L - PROGRAMMING AND ALGORITHMS 1

The aim of this course is to teach the principles of structured programming using Python as a programming language. It is not the aim of the course to teach object-oriented programming, which will instead be one of the main topics of the course "Programmazione e Algoritmi 2"
EXPECTED LEARNING RESULTS
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
At the end of the course, the student must be able to:

illustrate the basic inner working of a computer and the meaning of algorithm
illustrate the concept of asymptotic computational complexity of an algorithm;
illustrate the principles of structured programming;
illustrate the basic methods that Java provides for input/output from/to the console;
illustrate the most important functions of the Python standard library for string manipulation, math calculations, input and output;
illustrate the characteristics and use of the main predefined data structures in Python: lists, sets and dictionaries;
illustrate the algorithms for linear and binary search and the the most common sorting algorithms.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING APPLIED
At the end of the course, the student must be able to:

manually generate the execution trace of a program written in the Python language;
write simple structured programs in Python;
calculate the asymptotic computational complexity of simple algorithms.

COMMUNICATION SKILLS
At the end of the course, the student must be able to explain the inner workings of programs and algorithms using correct and precise language.
LEARNING SKILLS
At the end of the course the student must be able to:

learn to use programming languages other than Python, as long as they are based on the same paradigm (structured imperative programming with dynamic typing), such as JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, etc..