CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)
Welcome to the web page describing past, present, and future seminars presented by staff, students, and visitors to the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.
View past or future seminars; or view the CSSESS Home Page.
Seminar
Introductory Programming with Python.
Speaker: Dr. Brendan McCane.
Institute: Department of Computer Science, University of Otago.
Time/Place: 3:10 pm, Friday, 6 Nov, in Room 111, Erskine Building.
All are welcome.
Abstract
This talk describes a new course introduced at Otago University in 2009, called ``Practical Programming in Python''. The course is intended as a first course in programming and uses the excellent programming language Python. Python was chosen because at an introductory level it is simple, has very few unexplainable concepts, and immediate feedback is possible. Despite these attributes, the language and language environment is as useful for practical programming tasks as any other language. We describe the principles used for designing the course, the curriculum and structure of the course, and the student outcomes.
Biography
Brendan completed his PhD in Computer Science in 1996. In 1997 he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Otago as a lecturer. He is currently Head-of-Department and Senior Lecturer. He has taught several courses including Object-Oriented Programming in both Java and C++.
Although his research interests are in computer vision and pattern recognition, he has had a keen interest in programming and programming languages. He was an early adopter of C++ (starting in 1991), and has always liked scripting languages (Perl, tcl, matlab, R). He has relatively recently discovered the joys of programming in Python.
View past or future seminars; or view the CSSESS Home Page.