Overview

This repository contains a series of exercises intended to introduce early learners to simple software engineering. The exercises will build into a functional enigma machine.

Requirements

• Command line access
• Python and git installed
• pytest module available
• No internet required (except to download the repository)

Assumed knowledge

• Previous programming experience
• Some basic python

Course plan

The main branch contains the initial state that learners should begin with. With each exercise, the student is asked to implement some code based on a simple specification. The instructions will be in an exerciseXX directory. The student should save and commit their code in the src directory. There will be some verification involved during each lesson.

When progressing to the next lesson, the learner should merge from the relevant exerciseXX branch, and follow the exercise instructions. These merges will not modify the src directory.

First step

• Open a terminal. On windows this will be "Command Prompt" or "Powershell". On Linux and macOS this will be a program called "Terminal".

• Clone this repository with git by typing the following:

git clone https://github.com/kilroyd/enigma

• Change to the new directory created by git

cd enigma

• Open intro/index.html in a browser for an introductory presentation about what we will be doing.

• Open intro/README.md for a guide to get familiar with the tools we will be using.

• Each exercise in an exerciseXX directory contains:

  • a presentation in index.html introducing the background and outline of the exercise. This can be used when a group of students are doing the exercise together.

  • a README.md going into more detail. It should be possible for students working on their own to just refer to these files.

  • a main.py file demonstrating how the code the exercise is intended to produce will be called. This can be used as a basic test by running exerciseXX/main.py from a terminal.

  • a template.py file containing a skeleton function or class that is intended to be copied to src/enigma.py. It contains some documentation about what needs to be implemented. It effectively defines the interface that the student must adhere to in their implementation.

References

Enigma on Wikipedia

Enigma at Crypto Museum