This program is completed largely at home / off campus and time on campus will be spent in collaborative work and addressing specific challenges to progress.
In this introduction to computer programming, students learn and practice key computer science concepts by building their own versions of popular web applications. They will learn Python, a powerful, easy-to-learn, and widely used programming language, and explore computer science basics, as they build their own search engine and social network.
Most importantly, students start thinking like a software engineer by solving interesting problems (how to build a web crawler or a social network) using computer programming.
This course is a first step into the world of computer science, and prepares students for intermediate-level computer science classes.
Throughout the course, students build a search engine by learning about and producing key search engine components including a crawler, an index and a page rank algorithm. As they build these pieces, they learn about and practice computer science skills that ready them for intermediate level computer science courses.
At the end of the course students will be given a set of relationships (i.e. strings of phrases like “Dave likes Andy, Kathleen and Kristy”) and then use their new computer science skills to organize these relationships into a social network.
