John David N. Dionisio, PhD

HNRS 2200

Cogitations on Computation
Honors Nature of Science, Technology, & Mathematics

Spring 2021

• Brightspace: Where you can access recordings of synchronous class sessions and supplementary asynchronous content, as well as check your grades
• We will look at some lessons from Khan Academy
• We will write code using Repl.it and CodePen
• Some information regarding being fully online

Assignments

• Video journal entries (50 points each, roughly every other Friday starting 0115 and skipping breaks): 0115, 0129, 0212, 0226, 0319, 0330, 0416, 0430 (overall recap)
  • 0115: Kickoff reading—Computing is a Natural Science by Peter Denning
    1. Pick a principle that resonated with you the most and briefly state why
    2. Has this article changed anything about your impression of computer science?
  • 0226: A little history, a little philosophy—Alan Turing’s seminal article Computing Machinery and Intelligence
• Assignment 0119 repl.it and CodePen account listing: 20 points
  • Khan Academy’s Introduction to JavaScript: Drawing & Animation lesson
  • Their open-ended playground in case you want to try out what you’ve learned
• Assignment 0204 Faces & Places: 80 points
  • Khan Academy’s lesson on interactivity
• Assignment 0311 Queries & Stories: 80 points
  • Khan Academy’s lesson on arrays
  • Khan Academy’s lesson on objects
  • Khan Academy’s lesson on arrays of objects (which is actually inside the objects lesson)
  • And no specific lesson but some other things to expressly think about: objects with arrays; arrays of objects with arrays; objects with arrays of objects; arrays of arrays; objects with objects; and on and on…
• Assignment 0408 Queries & Stories final milestone: 80 points
  • (same instructions as before, but this time the aim is for the fully-functional program by 0408)
• Assignment 0506 Hex’s & OS: 80 points for Hex’s, 80 points for OS

Key Resources

• JavaScript/web:
  • Khan Academy’s Introduction to HTML and CSS: Making Webpages lesson
  • Khan Academy’s HTML/JavaScript: Making webpages interactive lesson
  • Mozilla Developer Network
• Hitting the “hardware turtle:” Where software meets hardware

  For some base material on these topics, we refer to a familiar source—Khan Academy—and a new one: Tom Scott’s The Basics playlist.

  • Khan Academy’s Computers sequence introduces the central hardware aspects of modern computers
  • Tom Scott’s The Fetch-Execute Cycle: What’s Your Computer Actually Doing? introduction/overview video digs into that “input-process-output” cycle a little further
  • Khan Academy’s Digital Information sequence bridges the gap between the 1’s and 0’s of hardware and the numbers, text, and colors that we see
  • And we can go back to Tom Scott who then explains how this digital information translates into Data Types—and seeks to bridge the gap all the way to JavaScript (try some of those examples in your web browser’s Developer Tools Console!)
  • The next logical step here is to learn about operating systems—this one may be best done in class, so stand by (you’ll want to understand the earlier material first anyway 🧐)
• Python: official Python documentation