Course Objective 

This course is an introduction to the problem-solving and programming methodologies that are fundamental to the study of computer science, while learning about the popular programming language Python. Students gain considerable experience with fundamental language constructs and types, such as expressions, decisions, iteration, functions, structures, and strings. 

This course (and those to follow in the sequence) is modeled after a college-level class taught by this instructor but is accessible to students who have never programmed before. This is an excellent course for a student exploring the possibility of becoming a programmer or software engineer, or possibly pursuing a college degree in a Computer Science field.

As this is a self-paced class, a video and slide deck will be released each week. Students can watch the video and use the accompanying slide deck as their own pace. At the end of each lesson is a programming project for students to work on. These projects are designed to give students practicing using the techniques covered in that lesson. 

Students are encouraged to reach out to the instructor with any questions they have about the lesson material or the project. The instructor will typically respond within 24 hours. Students are also encouraged to submit their project code, which the instructor will make comments on and suggest improvements, if needed. The project will be discussed at the beginning of each next lesson video.

This course will cover the following topics: 

Functions with parameters, variable scope. Taking a deeper look at Functions (we started that back in Part 2), we find out how to pass different types of parameters into our user-defined functions.

Reading from external files. External files (text files, data files) are a great way to store data and share it between programs or sessions. Today we start using external files by reading data in from them.

Writing to external files, pickling, shelving. Once your program has modified existing data (that it read in) or generated new data, we need to be able to write it out to a file. Today we see how straightforward that is to do in Python.

Exceptions. If the user does something wrong, your program could crash. We want to prevent that. Catch the user's error, fix it, and move on. This is Exception Handling. 

Object Oriented Programming. Many programming languages focus on the idea of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), where the focus is creating 'objects' that can solve problems, or be used in solving problems. We start looking at how Python handles creating these objects.

OOP Part 2 - Inheritance, Polymorphism. More about Object Oriented Programming. Specifically setting objects to have constructors and destructors (for setup and cleanup) and how to start giving objects functionality - the ability to do things. 

Graphics with Python. Python has the ability to draw objects (lines, shapes, fills) to the screen, as well as create windows, buttons, and forms!