Understanding Computer Science

• Introductions of each student's goals for the instructor to create an understanding of their main project interests

• What is the internet: how the internet works and what computer networks are

• Safe computing: personally identifiable information, data breaches

• Dangers of Computing: exploring how a virus, worm, malware, phishing, rouge access point, and keylogging technology are used on the web

• Computer networks: bandwidth, Transmission Control Protocol, Internet Protocol, User Data Protocol, The World Wide Web

• Design and Development: what the development process is and when to use the iterative development process over the incremental development process

• Steps to establish requirements, create a design, implement the design, verify the design, and also maintain it

Introduction to Data

• What bits are and how binary digits are used

• How we can understand binary numbers easily

• Understanding the American Standard Code for Information and what decimal, hexadecimal, binary, octal, and char are

• Data compression through encoding, substituting, and using algorithms

• Lossless compression algorithms versus lossy compression algorithms

• Abstraction: analog data, digital data, overflow errors

Using Data and Fixing Computing Errors

• How data can be transmitted when communicating from a sender to a receiver: data packets reaching a final destination

• Encryption: Caesar Cipher, symmetric key encryption, public key encryption, decryption

• Using data in programs: data mining, text analysis

• Transforming data through visualizations, creating categories in a data set, comparing or combing data, modifying data sets

• Data analysis: patterns, trends, correlations, relationships, and outliers

• Processing programs: visualization, search tools, and data filtering

Introducing Programming in Python: Data Types and Representing Data

• Data types: floats and integers, strings, lists, booleans

• Determining data types

• Strings, Lists, Tuples: how to use functions such as length, repetition, slice, join and split, count, index, and concatenation

• Mutability: why lists are mutable and strings are immutable

• Methods of mutability

Computing Errors

• Common computing errors: how to identify, find, and correct

• Debugging: understand what you are doing, work in bite-sized pieces, keep revising

• Syntax errors, runtime errors, semantic errors, type errors, name errors, and value errors

• Midpoint review and clarifying questions

Operators, Operands, and Relations

• Operators and operands: learn to use exponents, multiply, divide, find remainder, add, and subtract though programming

• Math in programming: boolean algebra

• Logical operators: using the in, not in, and, or, and not operators with boolean expressions

• Relational operators: Using the equal, not equal, greater or less than or equal to, not equal, less than or greater than functions

Conditionals and Patterns

• Conditional Selection: unary selection, binary selection

• Conditionals: nested conditionals and chained conditionals

• Iteration: for loop, accumulator pattern

• Using for loop: repetition, using values, and ranges

Using Turtle Methods and Importing Modules

• Importing modules in different contexts

• Giving Turtle commands: attributes, multiple turtle, and turtle methods

• Creating Turtle designs

• Final discussion and key takeaways

Mapping Out the Future

• Before Session 8, parents will be sent an interest form to speak with the instructor and their child on preparing for the future. This can include course selection discussion, advise on taking initiative in school, and how to begin and plan for a passion project. Time slots will be assigned to interested students for after class on session 8.

  • Planning for each student to create an action plan: identifying a societal issue, brainstorming steps to solve that problem, and creating a plan to take action

  • Advice from instructor about combatting the gender gap and how to take initiative inside and outside of school: discussion of how to successfully complete an impressive standout passion project