Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

This subject 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.

6.00 is designed to help you become skillful at making the computer do what you want it to do. Once you acquire this skill, your first instinct when confronted with many tasks will be to write a program to do the task for you. Said another way, we want to help you learn to apply computational modes of thought to frame problems, and to guide the process of deducing information in a computational manner.

This means that the primary knowledge you will take away from this course is the art of computational problem solving. Unlike many introductory level courses, having an ability to memorize facts will be of little help in 6.00. This course is about learning to solve problems, not learning facts. (This, by the way, is exactly why all exams are open book.)

Technical Requirements

In 6.00, we will use the Python programming language. You'll also need an editor and/or development environment for writing and debugging your programs. In 6.00, we will be using IDLE, a programming environment specially designed for python programming and included with the python distribution. these programs are available for installation on your personal computers (see below).

You can install the 6.00 software on your personal computer if your operating system is GNU/Linux, Windows (7/XP), or MacOS X. In all cases, you will need Python version 2.5.4 (any 2.5.x or 2.6.x version of python will work, but 3.0 versions are not compatible). below are direct links to the most common python installers

Windows: Download and install: Windows Installer

Mac OS X: Download and install: Mac OS X Installer

Warning: On the Python homepage, the latest version available for download is actually 3.0. Do not install this! This version is not backwards compatible with the code that you'll be writing in this course (for example, you have to type print("test") instead of print "test"). Instead, be sure to download the version listed above.

Quelle:

Guttag, John. 6.00SC Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Spring 2011. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Lizenz: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA