Computers are used every day for an enormous variety of tasks, from playing games and chatting with friends to transferring billions of dollars, delivering radiation treatments, and controlling the electrical grid. Computer programs are an essential ingredient in allowing for this great diversity of applications. In this course, you will learn to create your own programs, based on core programming concepts and analytical problem solving approaches. You will develop dynamic programs by first using Adobe Flash CS4 and AS3 (ActionScript 3), the technology behind many Web applications.

The matrix-based programming language Matlab will be used to introduce students to programming and fundamental computing methodologies such as top-down design and objects. Course work will involve vectors, matrices, numerical integration and differentiation, curve-fitting and graphics. The course is programming intensive.

This course builds on the basic programming concepts learned in Computer Science 101. Emphasis is on developing the skills needed to write more sophisticated programs. This includes strategies to aid in assuring the correctness of programs through the use of assertions and unit testing as well as advanced Java features such as inheritance, polymorphism, and network programming. We will also introduce some widely used data structures such as vectors and linked lists. This course is programming-intensive.

Using Java. Solving problems with computers is accomplished by writing programs that operate on data to produce a desired result. The way data is organized and presented to the program can significantly affect its efficiency and simplicity and can sometimes determine whether or not a program can be written to solve the problem at all. This course presents ways of organizing data into 'data structures' and analyzes how structuring the data can improve program performance.This course is programming intensive.

This course looks at the inner workings of a computer and computer systems. It is an introduction to computer architecture. Specific topics include assembly language programming, memory, and I/O issues. This course is programming intensive.

How does Mapquest find the best route between two locations? How do computers help to decode the human genome? At the heart of these and other complex computer applications are nontrivial algorithms. While algorithms must be specialized to an application, there are some standard ways of approaching algorithmic problems that tend to be useful in many applications. Among other topics, we will explore graph algorithms, greedy algorithms, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and network flow.