A project based course that looks under the hood at data structures and algorithms to see how they work. In addition to implementing these structures in an application; students will build them from scratch, analyze their complexity, and benchmark their performance to gain an understanding of their tradeoffs and when to use them in practice. Students will write scripts, functions, and library modules to use text processing tools like regular expressions, construct and sample probability distributions to create a Markov language model and gain insight into how grammar works and natural language processing techniques.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Create Python programs that read and write text files and manipulate strings
- Build web apps with the Flask framework and deploy to the web
- Construct and sample probability distributions based on observed word frequencies
- Create Markov language models and use them to generate new sentences
- Use unit tests that assert correct behavior of functions and classes
- Implement core data structures including singly linked lists and hash tables
- Analyze the complexity of iterative algorithms and data structures with visual loop counting
Course Dates: 2024 Term 3 (January 17 - March 4)
Class Times: Monday, Wednesday 4:00 - 6:45pm PST
| Day | Lesson Topics |
|---|---|
| 01 | Strings & Random Numbers |
| 02 | Histogram Data Structures |
| 03 | Probability & Sampling |
| 04 | Flask Web App Development |
| 05 | Application Architecture |
| 06 | Generating Sentences |
| 07 | Arrays & Linked Lists |
| - | Lab Day |
| 08 | Algorithm Analysis |
| 09 | Hash Tables |
| 10 | Hash Table Algorithm Analysis |
| 11 | Higher Order Markov Chains |
| 12 | Regular Expressions |
| 13 | Launch Day: Show & Tell |
Students will complete the following guided project tutorial in this course:
To pass this course, students must meet the following requirements:
- Actively participate in class and abide by the attendance policy
- Make up all classwork from all absences
- Complete the required project tutorial
- Turn in all deliverables on Gradescope