Media Computing Instructor Byung Kim Olsen 231 Office hours – MWF 9:00-10:00 AM or by appointment

Class website This is where you’ll find everything about the class  Syllabus  Homeworks/Projects/Labs  Announcements (You are responsible for these!!)

Course Objectives A general introduction to computer science, programming (coding), and problem solving Not about how to use MS Word, Photoshop, etc. You DO computer programming Open up to a wide variety of CS concepts/topics

Course Objectives In this course, you DO computer programming DO computer programming with immediate feedback Turtles Pictures etc.

Course Grading Program assignments and Projects (40%) Hands-on programming labs Quizzes (30%) In-class work (Labs) and other assignments (30%)

What is Computer Science ? Problem solving to what computers can understand It’s about communications and process Like writing a cooking recipe (algorithm) or solving a puzzle Media Computation: Why digitize media?  How can it possibly work?

Terminology Problem solving – a high-level strategy how do we think through problems can we develop instructions (strategies) to solve problems Programming – mechanical coding of the strategy how do we tell computers how to solve problems how can we express our ideas to computers

Example: Counting Dots

Another Strategy?

Picture Example I have a Santa picture

Picture Example I have a Santa picture And, I want its negative

 Articulation  Simplification  Generalization

Example Compute the class average Initialize total to zero Initialize counter to zero Input the first grade while the user has not as yet entered the sentinel add this grade into the running total add one to the grade counter input the next grade (possibly the sentinel) if the counter is not equal to zero set the average to the total divided by the counter print the average else print 'no grades were entered'

Example Compute the class average total = 0 counter = 0 while grades[counter] >=0: total = total + grades[counter] counter = counter+1 if counter > 0: average = total/counter print average else: print 'no grades were entered'

Course Objectives Able to read, understand, modify, and assemble programs that achieve useful communication tasks: Text manipulation, Image manipulation Learn what computer science is about, especially data representations, algorithms, encodings, forms of programming. Learn to articulate a process

Textbook Bryson Payne “Teach Your Kids to Code,” 2015, No Starch Press Reference Allen B. Downey tml tml Why Python ? Easy to learn Flexible Popular – used for Google web search engine Not very efficient   It’s used by companies like Google, Industrial Light & Magic, Nextel, and others

Other Programming Languages Python C Java Scheme def hello(): print “Hello World!” #include void main(){ printf”Hello World !\n”); } class HelloWorld { static public void main(String args[]){ System.out.println(“Hello World !”); } (define helloworld (lambda () (display “Hello World !”) (newline)))

What is Computer Science about ? Computer science is the study of recipes (algorithms) Computer scientists study…  How the recipes are written (algorithms, software engineering)  The units used in the recipes (data structures, databases)  What can recipes be written for (systems, intelligent systems, theory)  How well the recipes work (human-computer interfaces)

Key concept: The COMPUTER does the recipe! Make it as hard, tedious, complex as you want! Crank through a million genomes? No problem! Find one person in a 30,000 campus? Yawn! Process a million dots on the screen or a bazillion sound samples?  That’s media computation

Specialized Recipes Some people specialize in crepes or barbeque Computer scientists can also specialize on special kinds of recipes  Recipes that create pictures, sounds, movies, animations (graphics, computer music) Still others look at emergent properties of computer “recipes”  What happens when lots of recipes talk to one another (networking, non-linear systems)

A Recipe is a Statement of Process A recipe defines how something is done  In a programming language that defines how the recipe is written When you learn the recipe that implements a Photoshop filter, you learn how Photoshop does what it does. And that is powerful.

Finally: Programming is about Communicating Process A program is the most concise statement possible to communicate a process  That’s why it’s important to scientists and others who want to specify how to do something understandably in as few words as possible

What takes to code ? Capability of manipulating a computer Need to understand what tools there are Need to have a clear goal (objective) Need to specify steps to achieve the goal Recognize Mental Differences