CSE3 Fluency with Information Technology

1. Adventures in Computational Thinking By Jeanie Yu Overview CSE3 is a basic computer engineering course for non-Engineering majors. Description: proficiency with certain computer applications (traditional computerliteracy), principles on which you can build new understanding as ITevolves, high-level reasoning and IT problem solving, and basic webprogramming (HTML/XHTML). Computational thinking and data analysis anddata presentations. Daily in-class activities with weekly organized lab projects. • Becoming Skilled at Information Technology • Algorithms and Digitizing Information • Data and Information Analysis and Presentation • Problem Solving Visual Programming with Scratch Computational Thinking Computational thinking is a new way of solving problems that gets its name because it uses many of the same techniques used by computer science. Computational thinking can be used to algorithmically solve complicated problems of scale. It is often used to solve problems of efficiency and to realize large improvements in efficiency through novel approaches to problem solving. Scratch is a programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab to help young people learn how to develop computer programs. With Scratch we made a character write words, and we also created multiple games such as pong and tic-tac-toe. Scratch is simple to use once you learn how to put together the puzzle pieces which symbolize the scripts. Image Analysis and Manipulation with Photoshop Data Analysis and Visualization with Excel CSE3 Fluency with Information Technology Presentation of Information with Word & PowerPoint Using spreadsheets in Excel, we made financial documents of our budgets at UCSD Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. We learned how to change photos, create animations, and write secret messages using photoshop. Using powerpoint and word, we accumulated the charts and graphs we made in lab and put them all into one organized powerpoint presentation. Before image. We also made spreadsheets using real time information on the temperatures of a buoy in the ocean, populations, and other information. This taught us how to deal with a massive amount of information on one spreadsheet, and how to turn the information into charts. After image. After tampering with the image levels, you can see the hidden message I wrote! We learned how to neatly create slides and make a visually appealing presentation.