Overview

Course Overview

In this course, we'll explore various applications of computing while learning how to code. Here's the tentative schedule.

Unit 0. What is Computing Science?

In the first week, we'll talk about what computing science is, where it came from, why it's awesome, and start to learn about how it works. You'll get set up with the tools that we'll be using in this class to help you become proficient computer scientists by the end of this course. By the way, in computing, we count from 0 :)

Unit 1. Chatbots with Personality

You will be learning about the basics of programming through exercises loosely based on chatbots, like Amazon Alexa or Siri. You'll make your first program in Python, learn about comments, outputting to the screen, creating lists, working with text, and changing output depending on conditions.

Unit 2. "You might also like..."

Recommendation systems such as Netflix's and Amazon's "You might also like" features are a great way to help people discover new things they may like. Under the hood, it's statistics, so we'll show you how to do that in a Python program.

Unit 3. Graphics and Animation

Pixar movies and your favourite 3D animated films these days are built with code. You'll make a basic animation using code, and learn how to build complex and beautiful graphics using a technique called recursion.

Unit 4. Computer Vision

Computers are so smart that they can recognise faces in images, to unlock your phone with your face. How do they do that? And how can cameras be used to guide robots and autonomous cars? We'll talk about how that works and you'll do exercises to write Python code to do process and understand photos.

Unit 5. Internet and Big Data

The Internet has become a hub of information. Lots of information. How can we sift through these billions of webpages and information points efficiently? We'll talk about searching and sorting algorithms, how to evaluate their effectiveness at the scale of millions.

Unit 6. Under The Hood

We've learned about many applications of computing science, but what's happening in our machines to make this happen? During this short module, we'll explore deeper into the machine's binary code to understand how it all works.