Winter School: Algorithmic Thinking

Students from all departments are invited to participate

Intended learning outcomes upon successful completion of the course, the students will be able to:

• discuss the importance of algorithms in the problem solving process
• create algorithms for solving simple problems using procedural and possibly very basic object-oriented techniques
• decompose a problem into smaller pieces and/or sub-problems
• identify the main properties and drawback of algorithms
• decide on the appropriate control flow and data structure for a given problem • basic programming tools

Programming and problem solving are essential skills for all students enrolled in any education program that requires a minimum amount of IT skills. Understanding how a computer is instructed to accomplish tasks and learning how to solve problems using a structured programming language provides a strong foundation of many concepts and ideas for these students. The main objective of the course is to introduce students to problem solving with a procedural approach using a high level programming language as a resource for developing software solutions. This course introduces, among others, the concept of algorithm, data types, data structures, control structures along with their use in and the use of programming tools. The programming language of our choice is Java.