Learning Objectives

In this session, our goal is to learn basic programming in Quorum. We expect everyone to come in with Quorum Studio installed. The goal is to go over how we use and navigate this technology.

In this tutorial, students will learn:

1. Students will understand context around what it means to program a computer
2. Students will be able to write a variable using the types boolean, integer, number, or text
3. Students will be able to use operators for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulus, and know how they impact different types
4. Students will know what a library is and why the concept is important in computer science

Types and Output in Quorum (25 minutes)

In this first part of the session, we are going to learn a bit about programming a computer, specifically in relation to types and output. A type can be a specific category of data we want to give meaning to in the form of a variable (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 would be of type integer). We can assign values to these types in the form of variables. In order to display on our console what these types are, we can use the keyword 'output' which would simply output our data types onto our screens.

We care about this because, in data science or really any computer science, types are a fundamental building block in writing software that does something specific. We will reference the types and output page as a starting point.

Using Operators (25 minutes)

In addition to types, computer programs often have operations and these are used in data science for many kinds of programs. We will use the operators tutorial for this part of the session. The crucial lesson to understand here is that operators mean different things depending on the type.

Using Libraries (10 minutes)

As one final lesson for this session, we will learn about libraries, which are pieces of code already written outside of our current program. Libraries come in many forms and throughout the sessions we will learn about many of them in regard to how they relate to data science. They are often written by other programmers, often with expertise in specific kinds of applications. It is important to recognize that this is necessary in computer science, as it would be impossible for any one person to fully, and completely, know an entire programming language and how it works. We will learn how to use libraries from the reference tutorial.

Next Tutorial

In the next tutorial, we will discuss Loading Tidy DataFrames, which describes learn about the tidy data format with dataframes..