Lecture one starts from the very basics. First, we’ll take a look at why this course is on the curriculum (there’s a solid reason!) and have a brief look at what you’ll learn – and what you probably won’t learn – during the course. We’ll also explore what you can expect from the course, if you already have some programming experience. After the introduction, we’ll familiarize ourselves with some basic programming terminology:

high level programming languages, interpreted languages, and compiled languages. We’ll then start looking at the Python programming language and discuss why Python is the Chosen Language for this course. Once that’s done, we’ll get to the good stuff and write our very first program, run it for the very first time, and see if the computer center has managed to install everything we need. Once everyone’s environment is working, we’ll start printing strings, doing basic calculations, and format and concatenate strings. We’ll also get to know what variables are, and, if time permits, have a look at conditional statements.