Computational Thinking

Week 1

Flow Charts
What is a Flowchart?
Flowchart is a graphical representation of an algorithm. Programmers often use
it as a program-planning tool to solve a problem. It makes use of symbols
which are connected among them to indicate the flow of information and
processing.
The process of drawing a flowchart for an algorithm is known as “flowcharting”.

Basic Symbols used in Flowchart Designs

 Terminal: The oval symbol indicates Start, Stop and Halt in a program’s
logic flow. A pause/halt is generally used in a program logic under some
error conditions. Terminal is the first and last symbols in the flowchart.

Input/Output: A parallelogram denotes any function of input/output type.

Program instructions that take input from input devices and display output
on output devices are indicated with parallelogram in a flowchart.

Processing: A box represents arithmetic instructions. All arithmetic

processes such as adding, subtracting, multiplication and division are
indicated by action or process symbol.

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 Decision Diamond symbol represents a decision point. Decision based
operations such as yes/no question or true/false are indicated by diamond
in flowchart.

Connectors: Whenever flowchart becomes complex or it spreads over

more than one page, it is useful to use connectors to avoid any confusions.
It is represented by a circle.

Flow lines: Flow lines indicate the exact sequence in which instructions are
executed. Arrows represent the direction of flow of control and relationship
among different symbols of flowchart.

Advantages of Flowchart:

Flowcharts are better way of communicating the logic of system.

Flowcharts act as a guide for blueprint during program designed.

Flowcharts helps in debugging process.

With the help of flowcharts programs can be easily analyzed.

It provides better documentation.

Flowcharts serve as a good proper documentation.

Disadvantages of Flowchart:

It is difficult to draw flowchart for large and complex programs.

In this their is no standard to determine the amount of detail.

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 Difficult to reproduce the flowcharts.

It is very difficult to modify the Flowchart.

Example : Draw a flowchart to input two numbers from user and display the
largest of two numbers

Example:

Sanity of Data
The sanity of data: what we observed
• We organized our data set into cards, each storing one data item
• Each card had a number of elements, e.g.:
• numbers (e.g. marks)
• sequence of characters (e.g. name, bill item, word, etc)
• We observed that there were restrictions on the values each element
can take:
• for example marks has to lie between 0 and 100
• name cannot have funny characters
• Constraints on the kinds of operations that can be performed:
• addition of marks is possible
• but a multiplication of marks does not make sense!

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 • compare one name with another to generate a boolean type True or False)
• but cannot add a name with another!

Data Types
Data types are of 3 kinds

 Charecter - Alpha-Numerics, Special Symbols - We can't perform any

operations on this type of data - Result type - undefinded

 Integers - Numerics range from Minus infinty to plus infinity - operations

+,-,*,/,%, <,> - Result type: Integer or boolean

 Boolean True or False - operations AND, OR - result type Boolean

Subtypes:

Integers:
Dates, Marks, Quantity, Ranks, count

Charecter:

Gender

Strings:

Names, City Words, Catagory

4. Record - Data type with multiple fields - each of which has a name and a
value Struct or Tuple)

Examples of Record:
Marks card , Words in a Paragraph , Shopping bills

List
• A sequence of data elements (for example a sequence of records)
• MarksCardList - is the data type for our data set of all marks cards
• Each element in the sequence is of MarksCard Record data type
• ParagraphWordList - is the data type for our word data set
• Each element in the sequence is of WordInPara Record data type
• ShoppingBillList - data type for the shopping bill data set
• We need to define the Record data type for a shopping bill

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Week 2

To find Max marks

 To Find max marks: Replace initialise with Max=0

 Replace Check for with Maths marks of Card X > max? if

so, update max

To find Maths max marks

 Initialise to MaxCardId=-1

 Replace do something to max = CardX.Maths, maxCardId =

CardX.id

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Week 3
Extraction of data and Creation of tables
1.Data on cards can be naturally represented using tables
2.Each attribute is a column in the table
3.Each card is a row in the table
4.Difficulty if the cards has a variable number of attributes Items in shopping
bill
5.Multiple rows | duplication of data
6.Split as separate tables and need to link via unique attribute
Tables

Procedures
A Procedure is a block of organized, reusable code that is used to perform a
single, related action. Procedure provide better modularity for your application
and a high degree of code reusing.

Example:

To call a Procedure,

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 use the Procedure name followed by parenthesis

 A procedure may not return a value

 Procedure call is a separate statement

 Use a procedure when the same computation is used for

differentsituations

 Parameters fix the context

 Use variables to save values returned by procedures

 Keep track of the outcomes of multiple procedure calls

 Procedures help to modularize pseudocode

 Avoid descibing the same process repeatedly

 If we improve the code in a procedure, benet automatically applies to all

procedure calls

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Week 4
Binning method is used to smoothing data or to handle noisy data. In this
method, the data is first sorted and then the sorted values are distributed into
a number of buckets or bins. As binning methods consult the neighborhood of
values, they perform local smoothing.

Example

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