| Class 1 | Tue 15‑1‑2013 | Quick introductions, etc., the parts of a computer, one of the reasons computers work in binary, two baby C++ programs: A and B, setting up a visual studio project. | ||||
| Class 2 | Thur 17‑1‑2013 | Visual studio: what a project really is, and what is happening when you use it. C++ is not the only programming language, but we have good reasons for choosing it, assembly language and binary executable code, bad old fortran, why you have to type C++ programs so very carefully exactly right. The types int, string, double, and void, and the basic aritmetical operators. | ||||
| Class 3 | Tue 22‑1‑2013 | Some practice with programming and good design: lots of triangles and squares. | ||||
| Class 4 | Thur 24‑1‑2013 | Some of the rules of C++. Kepler's discovery, and a program to check it, the final correct version. Bart's punishment, is this an improvement?, at least this is cleverer. | ||||
| Class 5 | Tue 29‑1‑2013 | Our new friend, the "if". Fixing Bart's punishment,
Helping Kepler to handle Saturn. Controlling repetition counters, converters, and tabulators; A useful graph plotter. | ||||
| Class 6 | Thur 31‑1‑2013 | Clarifying the important notion of the scope of a declaration. The evolution of a quite sophisticated graph plotter: one, two, three, four, five. | ||||
| Class 7 | Tue 5‑2‑2013 | Following complex patterns of repetition:
one,
two,
three,
extra one for practice. Overflow with powers of 2 and 10. | ||||
| Class 8 | Thur 7‑2‑2013 | An error proof quadratic equation solver. Printing cheques safely: the beginning. | ||||
| Class 9 | Tue 12‑2‑2013 | Inductive reasoning to ensure programs are correct.
Functions that call themselves, where it obviously isn't a just jump right
back to the beginning: being able to say all numbers in words, in seven
simple steps -
one,
two,
three,
four,
five,
six,
seven. Starting to think about stars. | ||||
| Class 10 | Thur 14‑2‑2013 | Fractal Stars and other shapes,
An irregular quadrilateral,
making the computer draw it,
The discovery of Broccoli. How to make bees, Brownian Motion with the while loop. | ||||
| Class 11 | Tue 19‑2‑2013 |
what a caprimulgus does at night. one hour tree experiments. an old test, and another old test. How to score zero on an assignment. Rabbit unix accounts, Basic unix commands. | ||||
| Class 12 | Thur 21‑2‑2013 | More Unix. From a dull guessing game, we evolve a square-root finder in three steps: first, second, third. | ||||
| Academic alerts due | ||||||
| Class 13 | Tue 26‑2‑2013 | More unix commands. And some practice: Fibonacci numbers slow and fast. Prime numbers. | ||||
| Class 14 | Thur 28‑2‑2013 | Test day. | ||||
| Class 15 | Tue 5‑3‑2013 | Software Engineering - Continuous refinement, starting from an obvious statement and
gradually expanding the level of detail until the result is a C++ program with a
clear record of how it was designed and how to discover errors. Assignments, update operators, loops within loops, and "for" loops. Variables and loops used correctly: part one, part two. | ||||
| Class 16 | Thur 7‑3‑2013 | Using the standard C++ libraries: A surprise 5 in the fibonacci sequence. Reference parameters, putting numbers in order. | ||||
| Spring Break | ||||||
| Class 17 | Tue 19‑3‑2013 | Brief test review. A partial program written by a program: step 1 (not quite right), step 2. An ofstream to create a text file. | ||||
| Class 18 | Thur 21‑3‑2013 | A complete program written by a program:
step 3,
step 4. ofstreams and ifstreams, the right time to check .fail(), remember to .close(). | ||||
| Class 19 | Tue 26‑3‑2013 | The dangers of over-confidence. Making it create a .cpp file: fstreams must be reference parameters. If I ask it to sort 30 things, it uses {, |, }, ~ as variable names. Maybe the variables should be a1, a2, a3, etc. Then I can have as many as I want. That looks a lot like using an array. Using an array would be better! Looking at the output from that, we see that it can easily be modified into a nice simple flexible sorting program. | ||||
| Class 20 | Thur 28‑3‑2013 | Algorithm speed for sorting: analysis, experimentation, and extrapolation. We see that the number of operations performed by our sorting program, and therefore the time it takes is O(N2), and what that means. | ||||
| Class 21 | Tue 2‑4‑2013 | Simulations: the boy and the bull. The program works, but it is a big ugly lump. We need to work out a way to simplify and structure it. | ||||
| Class 22 | Thur 4‑4‑2013 | Introducing objects, they really tidied up the boy and the bull. So much so that it only took 30 seconds to simulate a dinosaur. | ||||
| Class 23 | Tue 9‑4‑2013 | Developing a program with arrays, structs, and files: a molecular weight calculator. (its data file). | ||||
| Class 24 | Thur 11‑4‑2013 | Comparing strings with arrays of char. Two dimensional arrays. Doing our own input processing to continue with the atomic calculator. More practice with making a program debug itself. | ||||
| Review | With the lab guys, Saturday at 3 pm or Sunday at 4 pm. | |||||
| Class 25 | Tue 16‑4‑2013 | Test Day. | ||||
| Class 26 | Thur 18‑4‑2013 | Objects Everywhere. Solving a complex problem with a simple robust program. A good solid molecular weight calculator. | ||||
| Class 27 | Tue 23‑4‑2013 | A good modular design makes programs more easily adaptable. Complex number calculations. | ||||
| Class 28 | Thur 25‑4‑2013 | Gaston
Julia,
Complex numbers in C++,
The expolring program. The final Mandelbrot set plotter. | ||||
| Lab Setup Guide Library downloads and documentation | ||||||||
| Lab 1 | 21-24 Jan | (pdf) | Using visual C++ to run programs; drawing stars and stick figures. | |||||
| Lab 2 | 28-31 Jan | (pdf) | Divide and conquer: building big programs from little functions. | |||||
| Lab 3 | 4-7 Feb | (pdf) | Controlling repetition in programs. | |||||
| Lab 4 | 11-14 Feb | (pdf) | A video game: exploding the enemy with a cannon (assistance with the drawing). | |||||
| Lab 5 | 18-21 Feb | (pdf) | A real-time animated clock application. | |||||
| Lab 6 | 25-28 Feb | (pdf) | Generating calendars and using Unix. | |||||
| Lab 7 | 4-7 Mar | (pdf) | A randomly generated Happy Street Scene. | |||||
| Lab 8 | 18-21 Mar | (pdf) | An interactive desk calculator. | |||||
| Lab 9 | 25-28 Mar | (pdf) | Meteorological data processing and visualisation. the data files | |||||
| Lab 10 | 1-4 Apr | (pdf) | Interactive map of the United States. Data files: state outlines, capitals. | |||||
| Lab 11 | 8-11 Apr | (pdf) | Database programming under Unix. Data files: database1.txt, 2, 35, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100. The special timing function. | |||||
| Lab 12 | 15-18 Apr | (pdf) | A robot seaching for treasure in a maze. sample maze | |||||
| Lab 13 | 22-25 Apr | (pdf) | An automatic robot: he turned into a video game. |
