Imperative Problem Solving

Instructor
Class Meetings
  • Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00–9:50am in Noyce 3819
Office Hours
  • Monday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
  • Wednesday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
  • Thursday, 10:00am–11:00am
  • Make an appointment, or drop in when I am unbooked. Please try to make just one appointment ahead of time each week so all students are able to attend office hours; if a time is still available the same day you are welcome to book another appointment or drop in.
Textbook
Mentors
  • Reo Saito (morning section)
  • Nicole Moreno Gonzalez (afternoon section)
Mentor Sessions
  • Wednesdays from 7–9pm in Noyce 3819
Evening Tutor Hours
  • Sunday, 3–5pm and 7–10pm in Noyce 3813 and 3815
  • Monday–Thursday, 7–10pm in Noyce 3813 and 3815

About this course

Welcome to the Spring 2026 session of CSC 161: Imperative Problem Solving. This website is for the morning section of the class. If you are in the afternoon section, please use the afternoon section’s site. The two sections will stay in sync as much as possible, but make sure you are using your section’s website when checking policies, assigned work, and deadlines.

This class uses the C programming language, a classic and influential example of an imperative language still in widespread use today. Imperative programming languages, and C in particular, sit quite close to the hardware that runs the programs we write; as a result, solving problems in C requires us to think carefully about the structure of our programs and the resources we use. The reward for this extra effort is that C programs can be extremely fast, and can run on practically any computing device. Building your imperative problem solving skills in C will prepare you for CSC 207: Object-Oriented Problem Solving, Data Structures, and Algorithms. You’ll also be prepared to pick up many of the C-inspired languages on your own, and of course you’ll be better at mixing approaches from both functional and imperative styles in any programming language.

Copyright © Charlie Curtsinger, Nicole Eikmeier, Priscilla Jimenez, and Dawn Nye

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Materials for this course are derived from work by Nicole Eikmeier, Fernanda Eliott, Barbara Johnson, Titus Klinge, Peter-Michael Osera, Sam Rebelsky, John Stone, Henry Walker, and Jerod Weinman.

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