Caltech LEAD 2012 - Computer Science

Welcome to the Caltech LEAD 2012 Computer Science website. This site contains all of the information associated with the Computer Science portion of the program, including lecture materials, assignments, and additional materials for setting up and operating your system.

Contact Information

Here are the names and email addresses of your fearless leaders:

• Mike Vanier: mvanier@cs.caltech.edu
• Donnie Pinkston: donnie@cms.caltech.edu
• Max Hirschhorn (TA): maxh@caltech.edu
• Jesse Salomon (TA): jsalomon@caltech.edu

Lecture Slides

• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 4
• Lecture 5
• Lecture 6
• Lecture 7
• Lecture 8
• Lecture 9
• Lecture 10
• Lecture 11
• Lecture 12
• Lecture 13

Tkinter demo files

These files contain short demonstrations of Tkinter features. You may find it useful to download them, experiment with them and adapt them when you are working on your projects.

• Alien.gif
• button.py
• button1.py
• button1b.py
• button1c.py
• button2.py
• button2b.py
• cbox1.py
• cbox2.py
• converter.py
• file_dlg1.py
• file_dlg2.py
• groups.py
• imgbutton.py
• mbox.py
• opts.py

Assignments

• Lab 1 - Python Warm-Up
• Lab 2 - Random Games
• Lab 3 - Turtle Graphics
• Lab 4 - Recursion
• Lab 5 - Tkinter widgets

Supplemental labs go into more computer-science-specific material. They aren't strictly required for the LEAD CS program, but we think you will find them very enjoyable and educational, so we really encourage you to try them.

• Supplemental Lab 1 - Algorithms and Sorting

Projects

At the end of the LEAD program, students will form teams and work on a programming project. On the last day of the program, students will give a presentation of their work and demonstrate their project.

A list of project ideas, as well as more information on projects, can be found here. If you have another idea for a project, please talk to Mike or Donnie or the TAs, and we will help you refine your ideas.

The list of projects and project groups is here.

Supplemental Material

This section contains background information you will need to be familiar with for the class:

• Setting Up and Using your PC

There is a wide range of helpful documentation available online for Python. Here are a few particularly helpful pages:

• Documentation for the built-in Python functions
• Functions that everybody knows and loves! Math functions like sum(), min(), max() and abs(). Type-conversion functions like int(), str(), float() and list(). IO functions like raw_input() and open(). And much much more!
  

• Documentation for the random module
• Functions like random.randint(), random.choice(), random.shuffle(), etc.

• Tkinter Documentation