CSC 100: The Beauty and Joy of Computing

Lab Exercises

As part of the CSC 100 (The Beauty and Joy of Computing) course development at UNCG, we have created a lab manual with detailed lab exercises. Some of these exercises draw on exercises used at the University of California at Berkeley and some draw on exercises from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, but most are new to the UNCG class. The main difference between these exercises and those from the other universities is that our write-ups provide a significant amount of context for activities, and go beyond making a list of actions for the students to do. While that makes these lab write-ups significantly more wordy, so require more time reading, we hope that the added context make these stand on their own better for students and other teachers who want to develop and deliver a Beauty and Joy class. These exercises are distributed under a Creative Commons licence - see the "Introduction" below for more information.

Introductory Material

Lab Exercises

  • Lab 1: Introduction to Scratch/BYOB - animations and communication (for Aug 24)
  • Lab 2: Making things interesting with interaction, variables, and more (for Aug 31)
  • Lab 3: Abstraction with Functions (for Sept 7)
  • Lab 4: Starting a simple math tutor program - and more interaction (for Sept 14)
  • Lab 5: Using lists for data (for Sept 21)
  • Lab 6: Experimenting with algorithms (for Sept 28)
  • Lab 7: Concurrency and parallelism (for Oct 5)
  • Lab 8: Send in the clones (for Oct 12)
  • Lab 9: Problem self-similarity and recursion (for Oct 19)
  • Lab 10: Putting it all together (for Oct 26)