Arkansas Programming I (Python)

In this lesson, students will learn what is meant by cybersecurity and explore a few news worthy cyber attacks. They will also discuss the Internet of Things and the increase in connected devices.

Cybersecurity is the protection of computer systems, networks, and data from digital attacks. Increased connectivity via the Internet of Things and reliance on computer devices to send and store data makes users more vulnerable to cyber attacks.

In this lesson, students will learn about The CIA Triad. The CIA Triad is a widely-accepted security measure that should be guaranteed in every secure system. It stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

• Confidentiality is the protection of information from people who are not authorized to view it.
• Integrity aims at ensuring that information is protected from unauthorized or unintentional alteration.
• Availability is the assurance that systems and data are accessible by authorized users when and where needed.

In this lesson, students understand how they can control and protect their footprint. As students use the Internet, they are building their digital footprint. This includes social media posts, emails, picture and video uploads amongst other online activities.

In this lesson, students will learn about and discuss cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication to harass or target someone. Cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else.

In this lesson, students will learn to recognize online predatory behavior and strategies on how to avoid and respond to it. The Internet is a great place to socialize, but it is important to be aware of risks. Common sense and following safety guidelines can help students stay safe online.

In this lesson, students will discuss and examine policies regarding privacy and security. Using best practices like setting strong passwords, reading privacy policies, and using https can help in staying safe online.

In this lesson, students will learn about and discuss information literacy. Information literacy is having the ability to find information, evaluate information credibility, and use information effectively.

In this lesson, students will learn about the impact of visually representing data to make information easier to analyze and use.

In this lesson, students learn how computers can be used to collect and store data. They learn best practices for interpreting data that is presented. Data visualizations can be very helpful in recognizing patterns and answering questions, but can also be used to mislead if skewed or full of bias.

We learn what simulations are, how they are used, and we simulate gravity and Conway’s Game of Life.

In this lesson, students will learn what copyright laws are and how to avoid copyright infringement. They will explore why copyright laws are important and how they protect the creators.

In this lesson, students will explore and discuss the ethics and legality around hacking. A security hacker is someone who seeks to break through defenses and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network. There are white hat hackers, who help companies find and protect exploits in their systems, and black hat hackers who hack maliciously.

Now that students have learned about digital citizenship and cyber hygiene, they will take what they have learned and create a PSA to inform members in the community about a topic!

In this lesson, students complete a summative assessment of the unit’s learning objectives.

In this lesson, students are introduced to coding with turtle graphics. Students will begin to recognize programs as sequences and groups of commands. Students will learn a few basic commands and then apply them right away by writing their first program.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to the layout of Tracy’s grid world and will learn how to use coordinate pairs to locate Tracy on the coordinate plane. They will add to the list of commands they know and can use to create Tracy graphics.

In this lesson, students will learn how to use the left and right commands in order to move Tracy to more locations on the canvas. They will now have many commands that can be used to have Tracy create more complex graphics.

In this lesson, students are introduced to for loops. They learn how for loops simplify the process of making small changes to a program and help avoid repeating code. For loops are written like this:

for i in range (4):
    // Code to be repeated 4 times

In this lesson, students are introduced to the ability to turn Tracy at any angle. With this feature, Tracy can now draw diagonal lines which opens up the possibility to draw multiple shapes that weren’t previously available.

In this lesson, students learn how to use comments to describe their programs. Comments are helpful because they allow programmers to leave notes about the programs they are writing. Students will also learn about the different types of comments that can be used and the benefits of using them.

In this short lesson, students will be introduced to the rules for naming elements in their code. Variables and functions that are used inside their programs will be named by students, so the following guidelines should be obeyed to be sure that the programs written are readable and successful.

In this lesson, students are introduced to functions. They start with the basics of defining a function and why we need them and will revisit a program they coded earlier in the unit to rewrite it using functions.

In this lesson, students are able to add some flair to their turtle graphics programs by controlling color, pensize, and fill. These new commands are added to the list of commands that have been already practiced in order to allow for more creativity in student programs.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the concept of Top Down Design. Top Down Design is the process of breaking down a program into functions or smaller parts to avoid repeated code and to make our programs more readable.

In this lesson, students will learn about abstraction. Abstraction is the act of managing complexity by dissociating information and details in order to focus on relevant concepts.

In this lesson, students will learn about a fundamental aspect of every programming language: Variables. A variable is something that stores information in a program that can be used later.

In this lesson, students will learn how to incorporate user input into their programs. Students will learn how to request user input as both strings and integers, where the input is stored, and how to convert strings and integers.

In this lesson, students will dive deeper into the concept of functions by exploring how to use parameters to customize their code.

In this lesson, students will expand their knowledge of for loops. They are aware that for loops execute the same lines of code a given number of times but will learn that i is actually a variable that can be used to control commands inside the loop as it is running.

In this lesson, students will learn the extended parameters that can be used to control the value of i in for loops. They will then be able to use the variable i to control much more of their code by setting specific values.

In this lesson, students will learn how to use If Statements which will allow them to use conditions to determine how their code should run.

In this lesson, students will learn how to expand on If Statements by including a way to have Tracy make decisions between multiple scenarios.

In this lesson, students will learn that while loops allow code to be executed repeatedly based on a condition. They will also be warned that infinite loops are created if the exit condition of the while loop is never met, causing the code inside the while loop to repeat continuously which causes the program to crash.

In this lesson, students will learn what pair programming is, why it is used, and the appropriate behaviors of a driver and navigator.

In this lesson, students will put together all the concepts they’ve learned thus far. They will be able to use top down design and to write programs that will solve complex problems.

In this lesson, students review content with a 25 question End-of-Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, students will have a high level discussion about what the internet is and how the internet works. The topics of anonymity and censorship will also be discussed.

When was the first computer made? What did it look like, and what was it used for? In this lesson, students will explore the creation and evolution of computing machines that now permeate our day-to-day life.

How are computers organized? What are the main components of a computer?

In this lesson, we will explore how different organizational structures of computers interact with each other to make computers functional.

What kinds of software do computers use and need?

In this lesson, the topic of software is broken down into types of software, how they interact, and the specific functions of the different types of software.

In this lesson, students will explore the hardware that makes up the internet and the characteristics of that hardware that define our experience on the internet.

In this lesson, students will explore how internet hardware communicates using Internet Addresses and the Internet Protocol.

In this lesson, students will explore the DNS system and how it maps human readable domain names into actual accessible IP addresses.

In this lesson, students explore how messages get from one address on the internet to another.

In this lesson, students learn about the last piece of the puzzle for how the Internet works: Packets and Protocols. All information sent over the internet is broken down into small groups of bits called packets. The format for creating and reading packets is defined by open protocols so that all devices can read packets from all other devices.

In this lesson, students will learn what a number system is, the difference between the decimal number system and the binary number system, and how to convert between decimal and binary.

In this lesson, students will learn what a number system is, the difference between the decimal number system and the binary number system, and how to convert between decimal and binary.

In this lesson, students are presented with different ways that the Internet impacts their lives. The Internet affects the way that people communicate (emails, social media, video chat) and collaborate to solve problems. It has revolutionized the way that people can learn and even buy things. Because the Internet is present in almost every facet of people’s lives, there are severe ethical and legal concerns that derive from the Internet.

This lesson is a summative assessment of the unit’s learning objectives.

In this lesson, students learn how to use the command line interface to interact with files and folders, and access information about computer processes.

In this lesson, students will learn about different CLI commands and tools that will provide network information. Students will also take a look at network connection logs to determine the legitimacy of specific login attempts.

In this lesson, students will learn how to make the most basic python program- one that displays text on the screen. Students will learn how to print in python using the print statement. They will also learn how to use quotations, apostrophes, and strings.

In this lesson, students will be reintroduced to the concept of variables, which store information in a program to be used later. Students will also learn about three different variable types- strings, integers, and floating point numbers.

In this lesson, students revisit user input. They learn how to request user input as both strings and integers, learn where the input is stored, and learn how to convert strings and integers.

In this lesson, students will learn about using mathematical operators in their Python programs. They will work through multiple examples to get comfortable with operator precedence and using different types of operators.

In this lesson, students will be able to perform string operations in order to concatenate values together.

In this lesson, students revisit the concept of comments. Comments are helpful because they allow programmers to leave notes about the program they are writing.

In this lesson, students review content with a 20 question Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, students will revisit the concept of boolean values. Booleans refer to a value that is either true or false. Named after English-born mathematician, philosopher and logician, George Boole, Booleans are used to test whether a condition is true or false.

In this lesson, students will review how to use If and if/else statements. These statements allow programmers to use conditions to determine how their code should run.

In this lesson, students will dive into comparison operators. Comparison operators give the ability to compare two values. Using comparison operators in programming is similar to math in that less than <, greater than >, less than or equal to <=, and greater than or equal to >= are the same. The differences are that operators for equal to are == and not equal are !=. Using comparison operators allow programs to make decisions.

In this lesson, students will look at logical operators. Logical operators give the ability to connect or modify Boolean expressions. Three logical operators are NOT (!), or and and. These logical operators can be used in combination. With these logical operators, logical statements can be constructed, such as “I go to sleep when I am tired OR it’s after 9pm”, “I wear flip flops when I am outside AND it is NOT raining”.

In this lesson, students learn about the intricacies of floating point numbers. When using comparison operators with floating point numbers in Python, we will sometimes see strange behavior because of bizarre rounding methods. When using a comparison operator with floating point numbers, you should use round(x) to avoid strange rounding behavior. round(x, n) will round the float x to n decimal places. round(x) will round the float x to 0 decimal places.

In this lesson, students review content with a 15 question Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, students learn to use while loops in their Python programs. While loops allow code to be executed repeatedly based on a condition. They are also reminded of the possibility of creating an infinite loop, which occurs if the exit condition of the while loop is never met, causing the code inside the while loop to repeat continuously.

In this lesson, students will explore how to use for loops in their Python programs. They will be reminded how to use i as a variable in their programs as well as how to control the values of i by altering the starting, ending, and interval values.

In this lesson, students learn about break and continue statements. A break statement is used to immediately terminates a loop. A continue statement is used to skip out of future commands inside a loop and return back to the top of the loop. These statements can be used with for or while loops.

In this lesson, students will use control structures within control structures, which are referred to as nested control structures.

In this lesson, students review content with a 15 question Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, we learn about Functions. Functions let us break our program into different parts that we can organize and reuse however we like. Functions are the main building block of complex Python programs.

In this lesson, we dive deeper into the concept of functions by exploring how to use parameters.

In this lesson, we explore where variables exist and what the difference is between a local and global variable.

In this lesson, students explore functions with return values and deepen their understanding of and ability to use functions.

In this lesson, students explore Python’s way of handling errors with exceptions.

In this lesson, students review content with a 15 question Unit Quiz.

Students will learn how indexing can be used to specify a specific character in a string based on location.

Students will learn how slicing allows them to select multiple string values at once from a given string.

In Python, strings have the property of “immutability” which means they cannot be mutated or changed. You can assign strings to variables, and reassign new strings to the same variable, but individual characters within a string cannot be reassigned.

In this lesson, students will look at the use of for loops with strings. Since both string indices and for loops index at zero, the len value can be used to go through strings in a for loop. Indicies don’t need to be explicitly used. The syntax for character in my_string can be used to go through a for loop one character at a time.

In this lesson, students will see how the in keyword can be used in an if statement to see if a particular letter or substring is in a string.

In this lesson, students will learn about string methods. Methods are basically functions that you call on objects and can be used to alter our strings in different ways.

In this lesson, students review content with a 20 question Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, students will learn about and practice using tuples. A tuple is a heterogenous, immutable data type that stores an ordered sequence of things that can be accessed using indices.

In this lesson, students will learn about their second data structure, lists. A list is a mutable, heterogeneous data type that stores an ordered sequence of things.

In this lesson, students will learn how lists can be iterated over in a similar way to strings.

Methods, in general, are like functions that can be called on objects. Students have seen previously how string methods are called on strings. In this lesson, students will learn about the various list methods that can be called on lists!

In this lesson, students review content with a 15 question Unit Quiz.

In this lesson, students will learn how 2d lists are stored and how to use indexing and slicing to extract specific items from a list of lists.

In this lesson, students will learn how to use list comprehensions to alter the items in a list with one line of code.

In this lesson, students will learn how packing and unpacking makes assigning variables to list items very easy and quick.

In this lesson, students will see how dictionaries differ from other data structures and why they are useful.

In this lesson, students will learn the difference between equivalence and identity of values.

In this lesson, students review content with a 15 question Unit Quiz.

This project is broken up into several pieces to guide students through the game development.

Student has completed the entirety of the Intro to Computer Science in Python course!
Encourage to continue learning about Python with the supplemental lessons and projects.

Precision agriculture is the science of improving crop yields and assisting management decisions using high technology sensors and analysis tools. This lesson introduces students to the basic concepts of precision agriculture technologies and how it is changing the agricultural world.

Where is computing headed? What is Artificial Intelligence and what are the potential impacts that this might have on our world?

In this lesson, students learn about Artificial Intelligence and how the landscape of computing might change in the future. Students will discuss how these future developments might impact our society.

In this lesson, students will explore the careers available in computer science and learn how bias can affect computer programs.