Suggested 16-Week Lesson Plan

The table below maps each week of a standard 16-week semester to one or more chapters in this book. Weeks with heavier content assume two or three class meetings; weeks labeled Midterm or Final assume one meeting is used for assessment.

Week	Topic	Chapter(s)
1	Course overview, motivation, and environment setup	Context
2	Hardware, software, and the development environment	Hardware and Software
3	The terminal, shell commands, and running Python scripts	The Terminal
4	Data types, variables, expressions, and basic I/O	Python Data and Operations
5	Basic string operations and string methods	Basic String Operations
6	Decisions and conditional logic	Decisions
7	Defining and calling functions	Defining Functions of Your Own
8	Modules, imports, and variable scope	Modules and Variable Scope
9	Midterm review and assessment. User input: input(), argparse, and reading files	User Input
10	Error handling, exceptions, and defensive programming	Error Handling
11	While loops and interactive programs	While Loops
12	For loops, ranges, and list comprehensions	For Loops
13	Files, paths, and directories	Files, Paths, and Directories
14	Lists and tuples	Lists, Tuples
15	Dictionaries, lists of dictionaries, and dictionary algorithms	Dictionaries, Lists of Dictionaries, Dictionary Algorithms
16	Internet data, APIs, and graphical user interfaces. Final review.	Internet Data, Graphical User Interfaces with Tkinter

Advanced and Optional Topics

The following chapters extend the curriculum beyond the 16-week core. They are suitable for an honors section, a second course, or as enrichment for students who finish early.

Topic	Chapter
Classes and object-oriented programming	Classes and Object-Oriented Programming
Testing with pytest	Testing
Recursion	Recursion
Data structures (linked lists, stacks, queues)	Data Structures