Activity 6: Summary and consolidation

Congratulations on reaching the end of this course! Take a breath and realise this achievement. It is not easy to pick up new material and apply that material within a short period of time. I hope you enjoyed this short course, and you are excited to study more.

In this step, I would like to summarise what we have covered:

• This course introduced you to programming with Python. You now know what the term programming really means.
• You should also be able to describe what an algorithm is and how it differs from a computer program.
• You understand that learning to solve algorithmic problems is a skill, and it requires practice! Remember the L-shape puzzle?
• You were briefly introduced to the concept of propositional logic and propositional operators. Using this knowledge, you will be able to create programs that make decisions! You used this concept with the robotics project to decide how the robot should move!
• You know how to declare variables in Python to hold (or, better, in Python to point to) values/objects.
• You also learned some basic Python primitive data types: int, float, strings and booleans.
• You briefly interacted with string methods and you are aware of the object-oriented programming paradigm.
• You also learned how to receive input from a user, using the input function, and how to print output to the user using the print function.
• You now understand that sometimes programmers want to write comments for other humans or themselves. Programming languages offer a way to write comments for humans, and in Python we use the # to write a comment.
• You learned about if statements (if-elif-else). This is an essential concept in programming to create programs that take decisions.
• You learned about loops, and more specifically, the for and while loops.
• Finally, you were also introduced to the concept of functions and how to define your own functions.

Congratulations! Next, you will complete a short assessment with multiple choice questions. You can attempt this as many times as you want. Your aim is to achieve a 70% pass mark to be awarded your certificate. If you get questions wrong, please consider going back to the material to check your understanding.

To end the course, we will make suggestions about what you could do next to take your learning further.

How has this course supported you?

Now you have almost completed the course, it’s a good time to consider how your knowledge, confidence and aspirations have changed. Please answer this short end-of-course survey. It includes some prompts to help your reflection and will help us improve and evidence the impact of the course.

Note: this optional survey does not affect your completion of the course. Further detail on how we (University of Leeds) use survey responses is included at the start of the survey and in this Privacy Notice.