--- November 9 - February 15, 2021 ---

Launching into Computer Science

Module reflection

In this course I was introduced to how computers work. It is fascinating to know that computers only understand basic arithmetic operations; every software should be eventually translated into bits of information (zeros and ones) for the computer to be able to digest. However, with this simple architecture complex softwares can be generated to satisfy all sorts of needs. The diagram below shows the basic structure of a central processing unit (CPU) and a main memory.

Current computers process a large number of tasks at once. This is made possible by operating systems that are designed to manage computer resources sharing. This brings us to another topic that was covered in this course which is "Operating Systems". Other topics that were covered in this course include:

  • Computer professional ethics and code of conduct:
    Useful resources:
  • Code of Conduct of the British Computer Society (BCS)
  • Software Engineering Code of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Computer networks.
  • Software development cycle.
  • Data Structures.
  • An introduction to algorithms and programming concepts.
  • Introduction to Python.
  • Introduction to databases and structured query language (SQL).
  • Research trends in computer science including:
  • Cloud computing
  • Internet of Things (IOT)
  • Machine learning and Artificial intelligence