Programming with GUIs (FutureLearn)

Learn what a Graphical User Interface is and write your own GUI-based applications with this practical course for teachers. Gain hands-on experience building your own interface. Discover how to build your own Graphical User Interface (GUI) with guizero.

On this course supported by Google, you will learn how to incorporate more interactivity in your program. You will experiment with different types of widgets and build the confidence to design more complex GUI-based apps in the future.

You will have the opportunity to put what you’ve learnt to practice using the guizero library. Upon completion of the course, you will be able to produce applications with interactive elements such as buttons and text boxes.

What topics will you cover?

– Using widgets to build a GUI

– Responding to user inputs using events

– Reading and modifying the properties of widgets

– Designing GUIs and using boxes and either auto or grid layouts to implement them

– Adjusting the appearance of your GUI to improve the user experience

– Using time-based events

– Decomposing a project to make it more manageable

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to…

– Experiment with different widgets that can be used to build a GUI

– Develop a GUI that responds to the user through the use of events

– Explain how event driven programming works, and the differences between an event driven program and a procedural program

– Produce a countdown timer using guizero’s built-in methods

– Design several different GUIs, including a text editor and a picture-matching game