This AoF is the programming core of our curriculum. Students learn how to develop software for desktops, mobile devices, and web pages. This is also the context in which we plan to explore design of games. Here are the relevant courses as well as the prerequisite relations among them; those in blue are required, those in yellow are for electives for deeper experience.
- Principles of Computer Science I: [Python-based] This course is an introduction to solving problems by writing code. Students will become competent introductory python programmers, knowing how to design, develop, test, and analyze python code. They will be comfortable with the basic coding structures that are present across many programming languages, such as if statements, loops, and functions.
- Principles of Computer Science II: [Python-based] This course reinforces and strengthens the concepts learned in "Computer Science I". It introduces object-oriented programming, functional programming, and basic algorithmic analysis. End-of-semester projects make use of APIs and libraries to access real-world data-sets and explore how programs can be useful to other disciplines or areas of interest.
- Web Programming, Back End: This course focuses on the creation of interactive and dynamic web pages. Students study the technologies and concepts necessary to add interactive scripts to web pages (client-side programming), receive and supply information to web pages (server-side programming using scripting), and store information (database creation).
- Game Development: This course explores game development using a game engine (Godot). Students learn the basics of game design and development while reinforcing their programming skills. The course culminates with students designing and developing their own games.
- Introduction to Data Structures: [Java-based] This course covers foundational data structures and memory organization such as arrays, linked-lists, trees, and hash tables, as well as abstract data types such as lists, stacks, queues, and maps. Students engage in the scientific process to study the performance of these different data structures from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.
- Mobile Development: [JavaScript-based] Phones and tablets are the most used form of computer on the planet. Because of their small size and limited hardware resources (memory, processing power), apps have to be developed for a mobile device in a unique manner. Complicating this is the fact that iPhones and Android phones and mobile devices are structured differently and use different environments and languages for developing apps. This course discusses the principles of design for mobile devices and then uses the environment "React Native" to create apps that will run on both iOS and Android devices.
- Programming Languages: This course covers programming language constructs, including design aspects, machine models, language constructs, syntax, and semantics. It includes a survey of actual programming languages representative of common paradigms, critically comparing the design choices and features unique to each. Algorithmic, functional, and logical languages are considered as well. Students learn how to build their own interpreter as well as design their own domain specific language.
- HCI: User Interface Design and Development: This course presents the fundamental concepts of design, prototyping, evaluation, and implementation of user interfaces (UIs), which are part of the field of HCI (human-computer interaction). Topics of study include user-centered design, task analysis, prototyping, interface design principles, user testing, interface metaphors, windows and event-driven programming, and heuristic evaluation.
- Software Engineering: This course is an introduction to the software development process, focusing on analysis, design, programming, and testing of medium-scale team projects. We discuss different project development techniques with a focus on Agile development, specifically SCRUM. Students learn how to deliver useful, reliable, scalable software products in a timely manner.
And here are the above courses in the context of our entire curriculum:
