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600.103 FUNDAMENTALS OF PRACTICAL COMPUTING. Intended audience: Students considering a major in science, engineering or medicine Small Class Diversity: Geeks Mainstream like Calculus &“typing” College High School Elementary School Fun (not too much work) Sell the field
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600.103 FUNDAMENTALS OF PRACTICAL COMPUTING • Intended audience: • Students considering a major in • science, engineering or medicine • Small Class • Diversity: Geeks Mainstream • like Calculus &“typing” • College High School Elementary School • Fun (not too much work) Sell the field • Post lecture notes on web (no textbooks) • Practical: • Please bring laptops to class if you can • Familiarize students with lots of stuff (breadth) • Not just a single programming language (not depth) • Fundamentals: • Lots more to Computer Science than hacking
Teamwork, Web-work, etc. • Encourage teamwork, Google, Wikipedia, etc. • Homework: • Submit by email to Kenneth.Church@jhu.edu • Due Tuesday and Thursday mornings at sunrise • So I have time to adjust my lectures (if necessary) • Target: 2 hours per hour of class • 1 hour installing software, plus • 1 hour of exercises (as opposed to problem sets) • Homework comes with hints (as opposed to recipes) • Feel free to ask for more hints (Kenneth.Church@jhu.edu) • Example: Use Google to figure out how to install • Scratch (a programming language for middle school kids) • Python (a programming language for …)
What will you learn from this course? • Probably not much… • If this is the only Computer Science course that you will ever take • There is only so much I can expect you to learn • Hope: • In a decade from now, • if you need to program something simple in a hurry • (in a language that none of us know anything about), • you will have the confidence that • you can search the web and • figure out what you need just-in-time
Open-Mind Exams: Mid-Term & Final • Open-mind: • Open book, Open laptop, Open network • Plenty of time (take-home) • Goal: • Confidence in your ability to search • Find what you need just-in-time • Please don’t cram (and please don’t cheat)
Languages (Freeware) • Scratch: Programming language for kids • Web: HTML, Javascript • Phones: VoiceXML • Spreadsheets • Databases: SQL • Stats: R • Python • Unix • C