Introduction to Programming (Second Edition)

Course description

Overview: This course introduces you to general programming concepts. Although the programming concepts introduced in this course apply to most programming languages, this course uses Visual Basic 6.0 running under Microsoft Windows as the platform for learning.

Prerequisites: Windows 95: Introduction.

Performance-based objectives

Lesson objectives help students become comfortable with the course, and also provide a means to evaluate learning. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Describe features and benefits of prevalent programming languages, and describe the general phases of software development, including: planning, coding, compiling, linking, and debugging.

Define the following terms related to object-oriented programming: objects, encapsulation, classes, instantiation, properties, methods, and events.

Identify and describe the purpose of literals, operators, and functions.

Use variables and constants to write programs that perform calculations.

Explain the purpose and general functionality provided by conditional statements, relational operators, and logical operators.

Explain the purpose and general functionality provided by Do While and For Next loops.

Explain the benefits of dividing large programming tasks into smaller tasks.

Identify the scope of variables within a given program.

Course content

Lesson 1: Overview of programming

Programs and languages

The programming process

Lesson 2: Object-oriented programming

Overview of object-oriented technology

Event-driven programming

Lesson 3: Calculations

Literals, operators, and functions

Lesson 4: Storing Values

Variables and data types

Lesson 5: Making decisions

Branching

Lesson 6: Looping

Exploring loops in Visual Basic

Lesson 7: Making programs modular

Units of code

Scope