1.2 Program Function and Purpose

  • Computing Innovations:
    • Applications= games, social media, business, productivity
    • Physical Devices= computers, smart phones, smart “things”, and wearables
    • Systems= E-commerce, cloud services, e-mail
  • Questions to ask:
    • Why does the computing innovation exist?
    • What problem(s) does the computing innovation solve?
    • What does the computing innovation allow us to do that we would not do before?
  • Identifying Inputs to Programs:
    • Computer Programs accept input in a variety of different forms: -tactile (touch) -audio -visual -text (incuding numerical values)
  • How do programs recieve input?
    • most programs are written in an event driven environment
      • “events” are triggered by some action, which usually sends input to the program (mouse clciks, screen taps/swipes, physical button clicks, keyboard entries, audio trigger)
  • input usually affects the output
    • What are outputs produced by a device?= visual, audio, tactile, text
    • what sort of output do your devices supply?= smart phone, laptop computer, gaming console
  • an action triggers an event:
    • action may be initialized by the user or another program/device
    • the program “jumps” to the code segement according to the event: the code segment is executed, output is triggered by the code segement
    • the program code is not necessarily executed “in order”: code segements are executed as they are called, according to evetns triggered
    • What is a program?= a collection of statements, a group of statements= code segment, executed according to the rules of the programming language (software)
  • description:
    • simply state what it does (so someone could use the segment in larger program)
    • how it does what it dows (explain in detail the code)

1.3 Program Design and Development

  • Developers decide on the program requirements that: describe how a program should behave, include list of user interactions, specifications outline of all requirements
  • How is a program developed?
    • program developmet is rarely a solo endeavor
    • usually developed by teams of people
    • individuals/teams wrk on different functional components
    • each member of the project deserves to recieves credit for their work
    • their names must be written in the documentation of the program indicating their contributions to the project
    • Giving credit: use comments, assign who fixes a problem, include author’s name and the source of any code segments being used

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Difficulties

  • I need to study the different functions and get used to identifying what is occuring in code.