Computer Science
Elements of Computer Programming
3 College Credits | UT Course Code: C S 303E | Core Code: 093
High School Course Prerequisite: Algebra I
Explore a future career in data science, game design, software development and other STEM fields.
In this yearlong course, students gain entry-level competence in the Python programming language and develop foundational skills with an understanding of real-world applications — including algorithms, games, visualizations and software design.
Through hands-on projects, students develop skills that are in high demand in today’s workforce. This course prepares students to pursue Career and Technical Education pathways, industry-based certifications or specialized college programs. No programming background is required.
Course Structure
This Project-Based Learning course creates an environment that encourages students to dream and to do — while giving them a safe space to collaborate and approach problems creatively.
Big Ideas
- Impact: Design innovative computational solutions that impact real-world technological issues in society, academia and industry.
- Automation: Apply code to automate recurring computing tasks and engage in decision-making behavior.
- Data management: Understand how data is represented in computation so that information can be transformed into useful output, such as text strings, .csv files and figures like heatmaps and geometric plots.
- Programming: Construct programs to solve a variety of creative tasks using different coding paradigms, such as functional and object-oriented programming.
- Abstraction: Use abstraction to simplify problems down to essential details necessary to harness routines available in standard libraries or produce code-based solutions, such as functions and classes.
- Algorithms: Develop detailed sets of instructions for processing data for specific purposes, such as searching, sorting and recursion.
What Students Gain
- Practice with structuring data and developing algorithms
- Exposure to multiple programming styles
- Creative problem solving
What Students Say
“Activities and projects I have worked on [in this course] persuaded me to further pursue who I want to be when I grow up.”