Session 2

An Introduction to Media Computation

810:061
Computer Science I: Media Computation

First, An Apology

... for the experience some of you had in the CS1 lab yesterday. It was unacceptable, and we will work with the sysadmin team to redress the problem.

Second, A Little Survey

... to help me learn a little bit about you, your goals, and your background. No one will see your responses but me.

• Name and e-mail address
• In which high school grade did you work the hardest?
• Where do you think you will rank in your class when you graduate UNI?
  Top 25% .. Top 50% .. Top 75% .. Bottom 25%
• What do you expect to be the biggest academic challenge during the coming year?
• List three characteristics of your best teacher(s) in your high school.
• What are your expectations for faculty at UNI -- how do you expect us to be similar to or different from your best (or worst) teachers in HS?

I'm asking you a few questions. Please ask me questions, too!

Today's Story

Today we will follow-up on last session and set the stage for next semester:

• What is computer science about?
• What do computers understand?
• What is "media computation"?
• What tools will we use, and how?

An Introduction to Computation

Computer science is the study processes. Each process takes the form of an algorithm, which you can think of as like a recipe for doing something. Computer scientists study:

• the recipes are written (algorithms)
• how to write recipes are written (programming, software engineering)
• the nature of the inputs and outputs (data structures, databases)
• what can recipes be written (theory, systems, artificial intelligence)
• how well the recipes work (theory, human-computer interfaces)

Some folks specialize on particular kinds of processes or processes in particular domains. Some folks look at the properties of interacting processes or the environment in which processes operate.

What Do Computer Understand?

... see slides (PDF).

The Rest of the Survey

... see the whole survey (PDF). The rest of the questions are more about you, and your computing background. They should help me know you better.

Review one guess: first high-level language. In-class guesses ranged from 1950 to 1986. The answer? We usually consider Fortran to be the first, so 1957. (We could go back as far as 1945 if we count some lab languages. Let's see if the Wisdom of Crowds works for us -- maybe our average answer will be (close to) right. I'll share the rest next time.

Dr. Java and Media Computation

... demo of Dr. Java, its interaction pane, and some simple Java expressions.

• encodings: integers and characters; strings.
• manipulations
  • some code opening a picture --

        String filename = "/Users/wallingf/Desktop/numb3rs-logo.jpg";
        Picture picture = new Picture( filename );
        picture.show();
    

  • some code working with the picture

        picture.negate();
        picture.show();
        picture.clearBlue();
        picture.show();
        picture.makeGrayscale();
        picture.show();
    

Don't worry that you don't understand the Java yet. As you read Chapter 2 of the text, you'll come to understand the simpler examples, and we will eventually understand it all -- and be able to write code of our own!