643 Week 1/15 Outline: Introduction to Systems Development

Here is how I lay out for the course:

1. We will meet regularly in CBA 176 on time. You need to check attendance via https://www.ecourse.org. You need to take notes and follow my demonstrations. At the end of the class, you should wrap up your notes and completed exercises and submit to ecourse.org as a proof of attendance for future references. 
2. We will typically finish one chapter each week (see syllabus). You will need to read the textbook chapter and/or follow online recordings for additional materials that not completed by the lectures. 
3. You weekly homework includes 10 multiple choice questions and 2-4 hands-on exercise questions. You can try the 10 multiple choice questions as many times as you like and the last score will be copied into your grade book.
4. We will use https://www.ecourse.org to manage your learning progress and Brightspace to download class recordings.

Learning Tip:

Organize Projects: Throughout the semester, we will develop data models incrementally for many classic problems such as customer orders, inventory management, clinic patient records, etc. 
Creativity Matters: The topic of systems design is unlike math or computer science ones. Questions are mostly open-ended and there are not correct answers. But there are good ones and bad ones. 
Wholistic Thinking: Some quiz questions check your understanding of concepts and techniques, but some are to check how you apply the concepts to practical problems. For the latter, think big first. For example, the question may expect you to image or construct a model for the problem first and then answer the question, which is only a small part of the model

Week 1 Outline

This lesson is to introduce the concepts related to systems development and review the basic programming concepts such as data types, variables, arrays, structures, and class.

1. Information Systems: concept of systems and information systems, components of information systems and their functionalities
2. Project Team Composition: Why do we need end users and programmers? 
3. Roles of systems analysts: Why do we need analysts?
4. Structured development processes and models: two paths to systems development, why to use models, difference between process models and procedure models
5. Object-oriented development processes and Models: what is the basic unit of code in structured development? What is the basic unit of code in object-oriented development? Static and dynamic views of a system in object-oriented programming
6. Programming Principles: memory and variables, four types of instructions, and How to declare variables of primitive types, arrays, and lists

Homework: 

1. Reading: Chapters 1 and 2 of LIU (2020)
2. Correctness Questions: online; Q4 and Q5 of Chapter 1 and Hands-on Assignment: Create OpenAI API key and install and setup Langflow Desktop (submit screenshots as proof of completion)