#programming for everybody

10 am EST, 8/14/2015

Today’s online office hours for “Programming for Everybody”, with Charles “Chuck” Severance and Colleen Van Lent, taking student questions as the course finishes this week.

The course, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) available on Coursera, is designed to teach basic programming skills in Python to students with little computer science background.

I had some difficulty understanding how tuples function, but I think I was mostly confused by how they were explained in the lecture. My understanding now is that they are a kind of list that can take multiple, immutable values as individual items -- like pairs or bunches -- where the order of the items can’t be changed. What threw me off is that you can’t sort them using .sort(), but there are ways to work around that using dictionaries.

The last assignment saw me recycling a lot of code from the one right before it. The hardest part was figuring out the proper way to sort the tuples, but it was staring me right in the face, in my notes from the lecture. Once I realized that, the only thing getting in my way was that I had accidentally copied down my notes wrong, and didn’t put in an extra pair of parentheses around the variables I wanted to append to my temporary list.

Even though I started the assignment late and with some trepidation, it was probably my shortest homework session yet. I started it basically knowing what I should do, but the exact details of how to write it properly were what got in the way.

Overall, I would say I enjoyed the class. It generally went at a good pace, and the lectures were extremely helpful. However, the classes on lists, dictionaries, and tuples did feel like they crammed more in than the lectures leading up to them, while the final exam didn’t cover some of that late material and was pretty simple. I think the last few weeks should be tweaked, so that material on collections in general is spread out more across the earlier classes, and the final exam really should cover everything. I also think the autograder needs some fixing, as people in the forums reported cheating it, and the messages it gives in regards to dropped grades are very confusing. 

I have always wanted to learn how to program, but my efforts have sputtered once I’ve learned a few basics. My schooling never emphasized it, and since I’ve had trouble with math all my life, I felt discouraged from studying it. 

However, I am a very curious person, and eventually, I set out on learning on my own time. I made some progress...then stopped. I simply couldn’t come up with any interesting projects for the life of me -- at least to fit my skill level. So, while I had attempted to teach myself Python years ago using the official tutorial, I had gotten equal parts bored and confused and quit.

I decided some weeks ago to try again. I signed up for Programming for Everybody, a free online course hosted by Coursera. It’s led by Professor Charles Severance of the University of Michigan, and is based on the free textbook, “Python for Informatics”. All the course materials are free to use and circulate -- they even have a Youtube page for the lectures. I found this very appealing because I could work at my own pace, but still had set classes and lectures to watch. Plus, free.

Like I said, I’ve always had a hard time with math. I probably have something called dyscalculia, which, in brief, is like dyslexia for numbers. I was never screened for it in childhood -- I did well in my other classes, so it was assumed I was just lazy. It was a very frustrating situation...everything would just get mixed up in my head.

Anyway, with a lot of work and diligence, I was able to go from failing high school math, to remedial classes, and upward toward Calculus I in college. However, I still struggle a lot with everyday calculations. So I found my new programming class a little intimidating at first. Everybody always told me you needed to be great at math to program -- while I still count on my fingers.

To my surprise, I was able to do pretty well in my new class. I had some background familiarity with the language to rely on, and I found that I could always work out a solution to the homework within the deadline, even if it took two days or more. As the class went on, my brainstorming sessions got shorter, and I could do assignments within a day (when I actually sat down to do them...).

I started wondering what else I could do with my knowledge, and devised some simple personal projects. The first, and longest, was a dice roll calculator for my D&D 4E character, a warlock. It was more complicated than I ever thought it would be, but after several days’ work finding and fixing bugs, I completed it. After that, I made a general dice roller, a numerology calculator, a guess the number game, a rock paper scissors game, and some other short projects. My latest is a simple Mad Libs game, which I came up with after learning tuples in class.

“Programming for Everybody” is drawing to a close now, and I have one more assignment to complete. I am moving on to the Coursera class “Introduction to Interactive Programming With Python” and the edX class “Introduction to Computer Science”. They both start in late August.

I’m learning to code in Python. It’s not so much a New Years resolution, but I would like to be able to program something by the end of the year that’s unprovoked, and to some benefit at least.

The only other interaction I’ve had with coding was from my time at School learning bits of True Basic. To put it simply, I didn’t grasp it. But recently discovering that I may have dyslexia might explain some of the issues that I had back then. That or I could have been completely incompetent!

I’m learning through the Coursera course, Programming for Everybody (I believe entry may be closed for just now. ). It goes right into the basics of the language and takes you through all of the theory, conditions, types, expressions ect and over around twelve weeks, takes you from knowing nothing to having a pretty good understanding of the language. It’s done with video, showing the lecturer, slides and code examples as well and I feel like I’m really taking it in this time.

I’ve been enjoying it so much that, when I found myself awake at 2am this morning, I was studying for the course and built a wee program that’s required for the assessment for the week. It’s a bit (lot) of a hack job.

The assignment is to create a program that calculates a user’s wage by multiplying their hours worked (h) by their hourly rate (r). On top of that, you have to accommodate for potential overtime and an increased hourly rate as a result of this. Anything over forty hours worked is considered overtime and the pay rate is time and a half. We were given the hours to use for the example (45) and the hourly rate (10.5) and had to calculate how much of the undeclared currency the user had earned.

As I said, it’s a total hack job, took about forty minutes for me to figure out and involved a lot of coffee. I’ll keep on going back and forth to make it more efficient and cut down on the commenting where it’s so obvious in the code what’s going on that I don’t need it, but here’s the working code so far.

# Asks the user for hours worked hrs = raw_input("Enter Hours:") h = float(hrs) # Asks the user for the hourly rate rate = raw_input("Enter Rate:") r = float(rate) # Basic pay pay = h * r # If user worked less than 40 hours if h < 40: print pay # If user worked more than 40 hours elif h > 40: # Calculates hours worked over 40 oth = h % 40 # Subtracts the overtime hours from the full number to make normh = 40 normh = h - oth # Calculates the pay for upto 40 hours normpay = normh * r # Multiplies the hourly rate by the overtime rate otr = r * 1.5 # Calculates the money earned over the 40 hour mark otpay = oth * otr # Adds the pre and post 40 hour amounts pay = normpay + otpay print pay quit()

The program outputs 498.75 as the answer.

Edit: Yep! Could be hefty simplified. Need to try and be more efficient with code. I’ve never been a mathematical thinker, so this is kinda new territory for me. Disappointed that I went round such a long route to get the number, but hey, I got the number eventually.

# How it should actually look... hours = raw_input("Enter hours: ") h = float(hours) rate = raw_input("Enter rate: ") r = float(rate) if hours <= 40 : pay = h * r else : pay = r * 40 + (r * 1.5 * (h - 40)) print pay