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In the summer of 2022, I taught an introductory programming course for eight incredible students on a program from the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation. This course closely mirrored the contents of the department’s introductory programming elements course, CS 303E, although it is not an official version focourse.

The course was primarily managed and run through Canvas. However, since I believe in making course materials available, I’ve posted the lectures and assignments here. Because these are recovered from Canvas/Slides, the formatting may be slightly off.

I would like to thank Mike Scott for letting me use his slides + template materials, and Bill Young for providing inspiration for several of the assignments.

Course Syllabus

Lecture Slides
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Assignments
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0001

·6 mins
Introduction Welcome to Intro to Programming! This will be a short, fast-paced introduction to programming in Python with a slight focus on numerical applications. The topics covered will be similar to that of a standard introductory course: conditionals, loops, lists, object-oriented programming, recursion, and overviews of Python's other library types.
·4 mins
You will prepare a short final project for this class. This is a chance for you to practice applying your Python programming skills to a real world application, and to learn a little more about programming in a specific field.
·4 mins
Minesweeper Counter Minesweeper is a popular single-player puzzle game. It is played on a 2D grid. When the player clicks on a square, it is revealed, and one of three possible outcomes occurs:
·7 mins
Ciphers For almost as long as humans have had writing, we have had ways of trying to conceal what we write. The oldest known cryptographic systems are from 1900 BCE, almost 4000 years ago.
·3 mins
Credit Card Validation When you enter a credit card number on most online websites, they can instantly tell whether the number is valid or not. How do they do this?
·4 mins
Storing and Reading Data In the last assignment, you created a simple 1D trajectory of a particle undergoing 1D diffusion. Sometimes, we may want to store the results for later analysis--for example, maybe we want to calculate lots of different statistics (mean distance from zero, mean squared distance from zero, how far it travels in a certain period, etc.
·4 mins
1D Diffusion Simulator Diffusion is one of the fundamental chemical processes which cause molecules to move. It is crucial to many (if not all) biological and chemical processes. How fast a molecule travels depends on two things: how fast the molecule diffuses, and any biasing force that might be applied to it.
·4 mins
Newton's Method for Square Root How do you find the square root of a number? This question has many important applications in science, graphics, and physical simulation. While there are many speedy, innovative (and sometimes mind-blowing) ways to do this, this assignment will have you implement one of the classic methods to solve this problem: Newton's Method.
·3 mins
Minimax Write a program which accepts an arbitrary number of integers as input from the user and prints the minimum and maximum of numbers entered. The user will stop the input loop by typing in the string "
·6 mins
Calculating Bridge Condition Scores Background Several months ago, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) released a report on the condition of every bridge in Texas. Some UT community memberswere concerned because a bridge on campus, the Moody pedestrian walkway, got a bridge rating score of 47.
·3 mins
DNA Library Part 2 The DNA library we made last time had a few disadvantages. In this assignment, we will hopefully fix some of them, as well as add some additional features.
·3 mins
DNA Library DNA is the chemical which encodes genetic information for all life on Earth. It consists of four bases: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine, in a linear structure. Interestingly, when doing computations, we often prefer to treat DNA as strings, because of its structural similarity to strings in computer science.
·6 mins
Solving the Heat Equation Take a metal bar which is hot at one end (suppose it was dipped in boiling water for a few seconds). What happens to it next? The heat moves down the bar--the hot end gets cooler and the cold end gets warmer--until the entire bar is a uniform temperature.
·3 mins
Tower Drawing Your task for this assignment is to write a program that prints a tower. For example, here is what an output of the UT Tower might look like (note that this output does not follow the rules, so you cannot use it for your assignment!
·4 mins
Assignment 0 Getting Set Up With Tooling In principle, you could write code with nothing but a pencil and paper. In practice, having good software tools is a huge help.