Overview of Programs as Instructions

Part 0 has helped us set the stage for the first leg of our journey, in which we will explore programs as instructions. As we saw in Digital Realities, programming is about building abstractions. There are different ways or styles of thinking about abstractions, called programming paradigms.

In this guide we will start by focusing on imperative programming, in which we view programs as a sequence of instructions that tell the computer what to do. Part 1 focuses directly on this perspective. You will learn how each instruction works, when to use them, and how to combine them to create small programs.

Your journey begins with Sequence and Data, where we will look at the basic premise of imperative programs: that programs are a sequence of instructions that manipulate data. In Communicating Syntax we detour to explore how the details of a programming language can be communicated, including the visual notation we will use. The bulk of Part 1 will come in Control Flow, which explores ways to achieve dynamic behaviour in the computer. Finally, the first leg of your journey will end in Project, which shows you how to combine these concepts to build a digital reality.

This part will focus on developing key competencies in:

• Computational thinking. By understanding how instructions work, you will start to see ways of using them to design and build digital realities.
• Algorithms. You will learn to translate larger tasks into steps the computer can execute.