CompSci//Media Arts - Morse Review + Control Flow

Computer Science 1

More & Control Flow

Today's Goal

Discussion on methods,
Revisit Info Theory Concepts\,
& Discussing Control Flow

Completed

What is information?
Number Bases & Overflow Errors
Encryption vs Encoding
Cryptography in History
Caesar Cipher in Python

Today

Discuss expected solution
Revisit Info Theory Concept
About Control Flow

Upcoming

Numbers to Letters and Back

Typing Practice

No typing today, maybe tomorrow

Morse Code Review

At this point, we've worked with both encoding and decoding Morse with Python. Here, I'll review a little bit on that process.

Morse Code:
Problems with Decoding

Last class, you worked on writing a Python program that would decode Morse back into their standard alpha-numeric characters. There are some difficulties with this. Let's briefly address the challenge that many of you discovered during this task.

How can we tackle this challenge?

There are a variety of possible solutions. Some of y'all found ways I didn't expect. That's absolutely fine. Almost every program can be written multiple ways.

Here, I'll explain the solution I was expecting.

Information Theory

Information theory is a fairly nebulous concept that a lot of people have a hard time putting into words.

Information theory is the study of how we measure information. It connects to every technology today, but also to topics we may not think as much about; like the odds of drawing an Ace on your next turn, or even how we communicate using language itself.

Even language is an encoding method to convey an idea.

Currently, we've talked mostly about transmitting and obscuring communication. Communication is the transfer of information.

Here's an overview of information theory related mostly to language.

info-theory-summary.mp4

We'll see additional overviews of Information Theory as we continue to move through the semester.

Algorithms and Control Flow

We've already talked a little bit about algorithms; essentially, a set of steps that produces a desired result. We've specifically only worked with writing out a series of commands that are executed in a specific order. However, in programming, we can also tell the computer to make choices or to repeat an instruction (or set of instructions). We call these control flow structures.

Here's an overview.

So far, our programs have made use of sequences. Sometimes the exact order of steps doesn't matter, sometimes it does. When programming some of our encoding and decoding programs, sometimes the exact order of steps matters.

We have not yet used selection or loops.
We will start to next class.

Control Flow with Python

Last class, we started talking a little about the concepts of Control Flow. Today, we will see how they are implemented in Python.

Let's learn a bit about how they work in Python. We'll start using them next week.

python-flow-control.mp4

TASK

No task today.