Fall 2020 Course Descriptions

COMP 10-01 Computer Science for All

S. Guyer
TR 9:00-10:15, Online (synchronous)
T+ Block

Computers are indispensable tools for research. This does not only hold for more technical fields such as physics or chemistry but also for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. While most students are competent users of standard software such as word processing or spreadsheets, the real power of the computer is unleashed when we are able to program it ourselves and make it do exactly what we want it to do.

This course is aimed at people who want to learn how to use computer science to solve basic information processing problems, such as analyzing text data and performing elementary statistics on them. It will cover elementary principles of computer science and will teach the student to independently write their own programs in the computer language Python.

This course is meant for people who have little or no previous experience in computer science. Therefore, in this course we do not assume that the students already know how to write computer programs. However, computer programming is a skill, and learning a new skill takes substantial amounts of effort and time. So the fact that this course is aimed at beginners does not mean that it is easy, or that it will involve less work than our other introduction courses, like e.g. COMP 11. On the contrary, it is very likely the case that this course will involves more effort than other introductory programming courses, if only because the fact that we do not assume any previous experience means that the road to our goal is going to be longer.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Passing this course does NOT fulfill the A&S Mathematics distribution requirement.


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