Building Programming Experience: A Lead-In to 6.001 IAP 2007

The lottery for 6.090 is now closed, and all entrants have been notified.

Description

This course will serve as an aggressively gentle introduction to programming for those students who lack background in the field. Specifically targeted at students with little or no programming experience, the course seeks to reach students who intend to take 6.001 in the Spring Term and feel they would struggle because they lack the necessary background. The main focus of the subject will be acquiring programming experience: instruction in programming fundamentals coupled with lots of practice problems. Lots of programming required, but lots of support provided.

Each day, the course will be a mix of lecture and lab as students are introduced to both the language scheme and the mechanics of how to actually write code. Homework will be assigned each evening. The course has one exam, which is designed to feel like quiz 1 of 6.001.

Logistics

Meets 1-4pm in 32-141 (note the change). Starts Wednesday January 10, 2007. Ends January 23. Monday January 15th is a holiday.

The course will be using Windows XP laptops. If you have one already, bring it to the first class. If not, IS&T will be providing loaner laptops for the duration of the class. These will be issued on the first day of class and returned on the last day of class.

Lectures

  1. Introduction and Basic Scheme [pdf]
  2. Procedures and Recursion [pdf]
  3. Recursive/Iterative Processes, Syntactic Sugar, Lists [pdf]
  4. List Procedures, Data Abstractions [pdf]
  5. Higher Order Procedures [pdf]
  6. Sorting, Searching & more HOPS [pdf]
  7. Quiz I[pdf] Solutions [pdf]
  8. Association lists, trees[pdf] lec7.scm
  9. Drawing pictures[pdf] graph.scm

Homework

  1. Homework 1 (out Wednesday, due Thursday)
  2. Homework 2 (out Thursday, due Friday)
  3. Homework 3 (out Friday, due Tuesday)
  4. Homework 4 (out Tuesday, due Wednesday) -- hw4def.scm
  5. Homework 5 (out Wednesday, due Thursday) -- nimrod.scm
  6. Homework 6 (out Thursday, due Friday) -- hw6def.scm
  7. Homework 7 (out Monday, due Tuesday) -- advgame.scm

Handouts

References

Instructor

Jacob Strauss (jastr@mit.edu, )

LAs

Stephanie Cavagnaro-Wong
Holli Rachall

The course staff can be reached at 6.090-staff@mit.edu.

Random Stuff

An intro to double-oh one
Ben said it would be lots of fun.
  the six oh nine oh theme
  was programming scheme,
And now we are sad that it's done.