This course is an introduction to Computer Science. Its goal is to help the students develop problem-solving skills, computational thinking, and acquire the fundamental programming skills necessary during the rest of the curriculum. The goals of this course are:

1. We will study several simple computational problems, some of the algorithms that solve them, and discuss these solutions.
2. We will learn structured and procedural programming in the C programming language and develop several programs to implement these algorithms.
3. We will learn several data types, their structure and representation in memory, and ways to manage the memory in a program.

Material:

Introduction, Algorithms and Programs, Types, Operators, I/O, Control Flow Instructions, Loop Instructions, Functions, Functions and Variables, Arrays, Strings, Multidimensional Arrays, Pointers, Dynamic Memory Management, File Management, Recursion, Sorting and Searching, Structure Types, Recursive Structures, Simply Linked Lists, Doubly Linked Lists, Other Properties of C, Other Programming Techniques.

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge:

• write code in C: good practices, avoiding errors, efficient program
• read code in C: understanding of the computation, finding errors

Understanding: 

• think computatively: what is the process for solving a given problem

Application:

•  change and adapt existing C code onto new problems or problem variations

Analysis: 

• solve problems: break down into subproblems (C functions), organize the solution

Synthesis: 

• combine existing solutions of smaller problems in order to solve larger ones

• use libraries, reuse code properly

Evaluation: 

• evaluate program quality, compare performance and speed, systematically test prorams, measure efficiency of various algorithms and solutions and decide on the optimal solution in every given problem

Student Performance evaluation