CSCI 40
Instructor: R. Teal Witter. Please call me Teal.
Class Times: Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:15 to 2:30pm in Robert Day 126.
Office Hours: Tuesdays from 1:00 to 4:00pm in Adams Hall 213.
Labs: Most weeks have a short lab. Run the local checks on each assignment page, then submit on Gradescope for the grade. You keep resubmitting until you score 100%.
Quizzes: Short weekly quizzes, taken on paper. They are open-note: bring any printed or handwritten notes you like, but no electronic devices. Each week’s practice bank is linked below; we work through it together in class.
Projects: Every two to three weeks you build something real: a webpage, a web scraper, your own ChatGPT, a Twitter clone. Projects carry generous extra credit and “choose your own adventure” tasks.
Resources: There is nothing to buy. Each week has a reading in place of a textbook; the primary references are Shay Howe’s Learn to Code HTML & CSS and Al Sweigart’s Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.
| Date | Topic | Lab | Quiz | Project |
| The Web | ||||
| Mon Aug 31 · Wed Sep 2 | HTML | Hello, Homepage (due 9/9) | Practice | Project 0 (due 9/16) |
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CSS | Dress It Up (due 9/16) | Practice | |
| Python Foundations | ||||
| Mon Sep 14 · Wed Sep 16 | Python | Doctests (due 9/23) | Practice | |
| Mon Sep 21 · Wed Sep 23 | Strings & Files | Download and Decode (due 9/30) | Practice | Project 1 (due 10/7) |
| Mon Sep 28 · Wed Sep 30 | Exceptions | Command-Line Tools (due 10/7) | Practice | |
| Working with Data | ||||
| Mon Oct 5 · Wed Oct 7 | Web Scraping | Web Data (due 10/14) | Practice | Project 2 (due 10/21) |
| Mon Oct 12 · Wed Oct 14 | The Shell | The Messy Repo (due 10/21) | Practice | |
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Objects & Classes | Objects and Collaboration (due 10/28) | Practice | |
| Mon Oct 26 · Wed Oct 28 | LLMs | More Project Setup (due 11/4) | Practice | Project 3 (due 11/11) |
| Mon Nov 2 · Wed Nov 4 | Syntactic Sugar | War Dialing (due 11/11) | Practice | |
| Mon Nov 9 · Wed Nov 11 | Regular Expressions | Redacted (due 11/18) | Practice | |
| Mon Nov 16 · Wed Nov 18 | JSON & Alternatives | Rosetta Stone (due 12/2) | Practice | Project 4 (due 12/2) |
| Web Applications | ||||
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Mon Nov 23 · |
SQL | APIs & Web Interfaces (due 12/2) | Practice | Final Project (due 12/16) |
| Mon Nov 30 · Wed Dec 2 | Backend Web Dev | FastAPI App (due 12/9) | Practice | |
| Mon Dec 7 · Wed Dec 9 | Last Day |
Capture the Flag (optional; due 12/16) Automate a Test (optional practice) |
Practice | |
| Wed Dec 16 · 2:00–5:00pm | Final project demos | |||