The course Fundamentals of Computer programming involves various activities such as
- understanding and analysis of problems,
- algorithm design,
- verification of requirements of algorithms including their correctness and resource consumption, and
- coding of algorithms.
This course is designed to allow learners to acquire the three basic skills of programming:
- problem-solving skills (understanding how you solve problems),
- algorithmic skills (knowing how to write the steps of their proposed solutions to specific problems),
- language skills (learning how to put the solutions into code and communicate it to the machine).
More specifically as a fundamental course, it is designed to introduce students to an overview of the different concepts of programming and problem-solving strategies. At the end of the course, the learners will be able to identify and demonstrate the basic programming constructors like
- Variables, Reserved words, Syntax diagrams, Constant declarations, Data types,
- the various programming concepts and techniques such as
- conditional statements,
- loops, array, strings, pointers (static and dynamic memory management),
- modular programming,
- user-defined data types (structure, union, and enumeration),
- object-oriented programming, error types, and debugging techniques.
Further, the application of programming techniques including file manipulation (processing of text files and binary files) and other advanced techniques like templates and vectors will also be discussed. For each topic, some coding guidelines and industry practices will be discussed. In general, this course empowers the learners in performing projects and solving different real-world problems using the target programming language.