Open Learning Initiative

Programming is really just a way of organizing a task so that it is replicable by something else -- a computer. If you have ever given someone directions, or written down a recipe, you have some experience with programming. Learning more about programming will help you develop the skills of systematically thinking about a task and breaking it down into manageable pieces.

Course Description

This class contextualizes the task of programming by focusing on media, such as images, audio, and interactive systems. By doing so, we hope to put programming in a relevant context. For example, iteration is a programming concept that is essential to creating negative and greyscale images. You will learn algorithms for blending two images together and how to hierarchical relationships are used to organize elements of a user interface.

This course is based on a well tested course for non CS students -- the Media Computation course taught at Georgia Tech and developed by Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson. Students in their course have gone from an average of 72% success rate in CS1 (but as low as 49% for majors such as management science) to an average success rate of 84%.