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, requiring more time to read through, 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 23)
  • Lab 2: Making things interesting with interaction, variables, and more (for Aug 30)
  • Lab 3: Abstraction with Functions (for Sept 6)
  • Lab 4: Starting a simple math tutor program (for Sept 13)
  • Lab 5: Using Lists for Data (for Sept 20)
  • Lab 6: Experimenting with Algorithms (for Sept 27)
  • Lab 7: Send in the Clones (for Oct 4)
  • Lab 8: Will be released in Blackboard at lab time (no pre-lab reading)
  • Lab 9: Problem self-similarity and recursion (for Oct 18)
  • Lab 10: Shall we play a game? (for Oct 25)