Courses in Computer Science, Roskilde University

EP1: Essential Programming I (preliminary course description)

The aim of this course is to enable the students to

• demonstrate insight in the basic techniques used within imperative and object-oriented programming, including
  • control statements (for-, if-, and while-statements, nested loops),
  • variables and data types (integers, boolean values, floating-point numbers, text strings),
  • data structures (arrays, arrays of higher dimensions),
  • methods (parameter passing, methods that return values, passing primitives values, passing reference values and objects),
  • classes (definition of methods, constructors, and fields),
  • objects (construction, accessing methods and fields), and
  • inheritance (specialization, extending classes with fields and methods)
• analyze a simple problem and then design and implement a well-structured, smaller program that solves this problem.

Programming is one of the most fundamental concepts within computer science. Many other disciplines within this area builds on the competences and the knowledge acquired when learning how to program.

This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to the fundamental structures that characterizes imperative programming along with their associated programming techniques. The course will also present an introduction to object-oriented programming as a tool to structuring programs into smaller parts.

The programming language used is Java, a modern high-level programming language. In addition to being a generally applicable programming language, Java provides facilities that ease the construction of graphical user-interfaces.