Chapter 01
Lists and Dictionaries Warm-Up
Quick hands-on practice with lists and dictionaries, the only tools the rest of the course builds on.
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BootcampExplorer
Practical Data Structures and Problem Solving
Your teenager learns the data structures that professional developers use, by building things that need them: an undo and redo buffer, an instant search that suggests as you type, a game leaderboard and matchmaking queue, and a matatu route planner that finds the fastest way across a city. Across 13 live online sessions they learn to measure code, choose the right structure for the job and explain the trade-off. Everything is hands-on, with no whiteboard maths. Before starting, your teenager should be able to do two things: write a function, and explain what a loop does. Nothing else is assumed. Zero to Shipped App covers both. Needs a computer that can run Python.
Can follow a lesson and type comfortably
What you'll learn
- Measure how fast and how memory-hungry a piece of code is, and say what it means for a bigger app
- Use stacks and queues for undo, redo and rate limiting
- Use hash maps and sets for instant lookups and duplicate detection
- Build a trie for autocomplete suggestions
- Use a heap for top scores and matchmaking
- Model a network as a graph and find the shortest route with BFS and Dijkstra
The course journey
What your child will explore
Follow the course from the first idea to the finished project.
Chapter 02Why Does My Code Lag?
Big O as a practical question, and a benchmark comparing a list search to a dictionary lookup.
Chapter 03Undo, Redo and the Buffer
Stacks and queues: an undo and redo buffer for a text editor.
There's more to explore
Create an account or log in to see all 13 chapters.