Overview
In this first part of the course, you start writing Python and learn how to run small programs of your own. You also begin building the habits that the later parts assume: reading code line by line, predicting what a program will do before running it, checking what it actually does, and looking at unfamiliar code, including AI-generated code, with a careful eye.
For broader practicalities, see Course Practicalities, which includes information about the workload, high-level learning objectives, working practices, and so on.
This part has two parallel goals. The first goal is practical: by the end of this part, you will write programs that print messages, read user input, store values in variables, work with text and numbers, and produce a small interactive script of your own. The second goal is more conceptual: you will start to see a program as a precise sequence of instructions whose behavior can be traced, explained, and verified.
The structure of this part is as follows:
- What Programming Is explains what programming is and why precision matters.
- Running Python in the Sandbox shows how to run small Python programs in the course’s online environment.
- Print and Input covers the first interactive programs: showing output and reading values from the user.
- Variables introduces named values and the idea that a running program has state.
- Working with Strings covers the most common operations on text.
- Numbers and Arithmetic covers integers, floats, simple calculations, and converting input to numbers.
- Tracing, Debug Prints, and Reading Code Line by Line develops the habit of following a program step by step.
- Reading Code You Didn’t Write extends that habit to code from other sources, including AI assistants.
- Your First Project: An Interactive Greeter is the project checkpoint where you start the long-running project and produce its first working version.
This part introduces a stance on AI tools that will recur throughout the course. AI assistants can write Python code, sometimes well and sometimes badly. Across the course, you will learn nine concrete skills for working with them. In this part, we begin with one of them: reading code carefully and asking what it actually does, not whether it looks confident.
Recommended Order of Work
A useful rhythm for this part is:
- read the chapters in order,
- complete the chapter exercises as you go,
- then complete the project checkpoint in Your First Project,
- and finish with the recap and feedback chapter.
Finally, at the end of the part, there is a recap and feedback chapter that briefly summarizes the part and asks for feedback.