Introduction to Programming
Programs are computer code. A program is made up of Algorithms and Data Structures
Taken from Stem Learning Course
An algorithm is a sequence of logical instructions for carrying out a specific task / or solve a specific problem. A Data Structure is simply somewhere to hold a piece of data.
So Programming is writing computer code to solve a problem or carry out a specific task by following sets of instructions which tell the computer exactly what to do, and what data to use, where to get it from and store it, and what to do with the data.
Algorithms are built from three basic logic structures - Sequencing, Selection and Iteration (loops). The pages on these and computational thinking are in the algorithms section of the site.
The most common data structures are variables and arrays (lists) , although you will see other more complex structures as well.
To help them develop their code, programmers use Computational Thinking .This involves Decomposition (breaking the problem down it all its sub problems), Abstraction (removing all the unecessary information to focus on the important information) and finally Algorithmic Thinking (working out the steps (algorithms) that can be repeated to solve the problem, and similar problems too)
Algorithms can be planned out using flow charts and pseudocode (follow the links to find out more). Common algorithms are for sorting information (into an order) and searching.
Programming languages are said to be higher level - closer to human speech, or lower level - closer to machine code and binary. Languages can also be described as visual such as Kodu and Scratch or textual such as Python.
A computer can only understand a program if it is in machine code - translators turn the outputted programs from other languages into this machine code.
