The Pedagogy of Programming

Welcome to the UB Pilot of Making With Code!

Curriculum

This is a high-level overview of the curricular units that comprise this introductory course.

Part I

The first three units are a tour through three programming paradigms, or ways of approaching computational problems. The first and most straightforward paradigm is imperative, which sees programs as instructions for the computer. If you clearly understand the task and understand how to express it in a way the computer can understand, you can write an imperative program. The second paradigm is functional, which sees programs as transformations on data. Something comes in and something comes out. And the third paradigm is object-oriented, which sees programs as models of a problem space. When modeling real-world situations (a common example is transactions between banks, accounts, and customers), object-oriented problems create objects which represent the various actors in the situation and the ways they can interact.

Along the way, the curriculum is structured to gradually introduce you to the syntax of Python, basic computational ideas such as abstraction, data structures, and algorithms, as well as the tools and practices of the trade.

Unit 0: Drawing ↕

This initial unit prioritizes quick wins: getting students making personally-meaningful things as fast as possible. This means we aren’t aiming for completeness. In particular, we’re not introducing data structures in this unit; most students won’t need them, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them in the next unit.

Working within the context of drawing, students practice building up complex programs from simple ones. We’ll use Python’s turtle library.

Learning goals

Imperative programming
Basics of syntax
Control flow: sequences, loops, conditionals, functions
Levels of abstraction: functions, modules
Decomposition and code reuse.
Introductory debugging strategies.

Project

Create some personally-meaningful drawing. First, a draft will be due with a sketch of the final project and some planning, including planned subroutines and pseudocode. Each drawing project should highlight the unique opportunities of computational art by utilizing repeated patterns, abstract designs, customization, and/or user/viewer interaction.

Unit 1: Data Science ↕

This unit focuses on data and functions. We will write functions for basic statistics such as mean, median, mode, and quartiles; we will implement several data visualizations; and we will inductively explore regression.

Learning goals

Introduction to functional programming; abstraction; function composition.
Types: int, str, float, bool.
Introduction to data structures and iteration.

Project

Collect some data or use an existing dataset. Frame a research question and use the data to answer it.

Unit 2: Games ↕

Games and other interactive media are some of the most important texts of the digital age. We will play and discuss several games, discussing how they work technically and drawing on theoretical perspectives to talk about how they create meaningful experiences for the player.

Learning goals

Designing programs, prototyping, and pseudocode
Decomposition of larger problems, incremental & iterative development of larger projects.
Object-oriented programming
Navigating multiple-file projects

Project

Create a game that matters, perhaps as part of a group. This will be very open-ended, but students will be required to submit a substantial proposal, including a game concept with some evidence of prototyping and iteration; wireframes of the game interface; decomposition of tasks and who plans to work on what.

Part II

The second part of the course follows a spiral curriculum, deepening concepts introduced in Part I while rounding out some of the most important conceptual domains within CS.

Unit 3: Networking ↕

Perhaps even more than through computational power, computers have transformed our lives through networking. This unit explores how computers interact with each other and will give us opportunities to think about the behavior of larger systems, including how our lives are touched by computer networks.

Unit 4: Hardware ↕

This unit will focus on how inanimate matter can be put to work doing computation. We will learn some basics of how operating systems interact with bare metal, how computers can interact with physical sensors and actuators (via RPi’s GPIO), as well as how communication works between computers, using ESP8266/32 chips. In this unit we will also read and write speculative fiction exploring the social future of computing hardware and embodiment.

Unit 5: Entrepreneurship ↕

This unit will consider what students can actually do with computers, and will serve as a capstone of the two-year sequence. Students will develop a hardware or software product designed either to be profitable or to solve a social problem. All projects must involve interaction with real-world potential clients. The unit will address human-computer interaction and design and prototyping methodologies, including the use of logging and analytics for quantitative user research.