Course syllabus

Course-PM

DAT425: Fundamentals of program development

LP1 HT26 (6 hp)

The course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering

Contact details

  • Examiner and lecturer:
Inari Listenmaa inari@chalmers.se 031 772 29 19
  • Teaching assistants:
Ali Rahimi ali.rahimi@chalmers.se 
Freek Geerligs geerligs@chalmers.se
Henrik Valter valterh@chalmers.se
Jonathan Otten jonathan.otten04@gmail.com
Nithit Sathornkit nithit@student.chalmers.se
Shirin Tavara tavara@chalmers.se
Vanja Danilo vanja.danilo04@gmail.com
  • Student representatives:
Ivan Cholopovas ivan@9729.se  
Joel Flytström flytstromjoel@gmail.com 
Lars Havig larshavig@icloud.com 
Haasan Hussein  haasanhussein111@gmail.com 
Ninnie Mårtensson ninniemartensson@gmail.com 

Schedule

The course schedule is available on TimeEdit.

The exam is on Wednesday 28 October at 14:00–18:00. You must sign up for the exam on Ladok by 11 October. Exam halls are announced a few days before the exam.

The lecture topics, slides, etc. will appear as modules as the course progresses.

Course literature

John M. Zelle, Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science. Franklin, Beedle, & Associates.

In this course we support both the 3rd and 4th edition of the book.

https://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/

The book is also available as e-book.

Learning outcomes

Knowledge and understanding

  • Grasp the relation between source code, the interpreter, and the machine.
  • Choose appropriate data types and data structures for different kinds of data, depending on their performance characteristics.
  • Design algorithms to solve simple programming problems.

Competence and skill

  • Structure small programs by the use of concepts such as iterations, functions, modules, classes, and methods.
  • Structure larger programs into manageable and reusable units.
  • Form readable, descriptive and well-documented program code.
  • Use programming for basic data analysis involving large textual or numeric files.
  • Express mathematical formulas as programming language expressions and algorithms.
  • Build basic interactive programs with text-based (and graphical) user interfaces.
  • Test programs, for instance using unit testing.
  • Use programming tools such as text editor, command line interface, and IDE (integrated development environment).
  • Use standard libraries and follow best programming practices.

Judgement and approach

  • Assess the difficulty and resources needed for typical programming tasks.

Content

The course is a first introduction to programming by using the general-purpose programming language Python. It gives a comprehensive knowledge of the language, enabling the student to write code for a wide variety of tasks and to read and reuse code written by other programmers.

  • Literals, types, variables, declarations, initialization, operators, expressions and statements, scope.
  • Control statements: if, while, for, break, continue, return try, raise.
  • Exceptions and exception handling.
  • functions, parameters, arguments, method calls, local variables.
  • Classes, objects, instance and class variables/methods.
  • Simple data structures (list, dictionary, set, stack).
  • One- and two-dimensional lists.
  • Input and output.
  • Introduction to graphical interfaces.
  • Overview of file handling.
  • Text handling, strings.

Organisation

The teaching consists of lectures, group work, exercises, as well as supervision in connection to the exercises.

Examination form

To pass the course it is necessary to do:

  • Two obligatory labs, which must be submitted before the deadline and approved by a supervisor. The grading can involve automatic testing, but supervisors also manually inspect the submissions for clarity, correctness and general quality.
  • Self-practice exercises, which must be orally explained to a supervisor at two occasions.
  • A digital exam. Permitted aids: one handwritten A4 sheet

Academic integrity rules

  • Copying from someone else’s solution is cheating
  • Communicating your solutions to another group is forbidden
  • Using AI tools (ChatGPT, etc.) is forbidden

Syllabus

For more details, see the course syllabus on the Chalmers website.