COMP1051: COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

• A-level Mathematics at Grade A

• To introduce students to fundamental concepts from Computer Science and give students an appreciation of the breadth of Computer Science and how different topics relate to one another.
• To give an awareness of the importance of computation and computational thinking in the modern world and the impact it has on technology advances and areas not immediately associated with Computer Science.
• To introduce students to the application of computational thinking in a range of settings across Computer Science.

• Basic architectural components of a PC.
• Different programming paradigms and how high-level programs are converted into machine code.
• Basic operations of the operating system.
• Propositional logic.
• Different computational problems, some solution methods to common problems and the notion of an algorithm.
• The notion of a computer and its formalism.
• The measurement and efficiency of solutions.
• Intrinsic complexity barriers and how to cope with them in practice.
• Ethical aspects of computing.
• A basic general-purpose high-level programming language and the implementation of programs in this language to implement examples of computational thinking in a variety of settings.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate: an appreciation of how hardware and software combine so as to execute compute programs
• an understanding of fundamental notions relating to problems and their solution in Computer Science
• an appreciation of the role of Computer Science and computational thinking in the modern world
• an understanding of several approaches to solving fundamental computational problems
• an appreciation of the practical limitations of computers and computation.

Subject-specific Skills:

• On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate: an ability to recognise and analyse computational problems in a variety of settings
• an ability to reason in propositional logic.
• an ability to apply methods and techniques relating to algorithms and computation in order to solve problems
• an ability to reason about the quality of a solution or an algorithm
• an ability to implement basic algorithms in a general-purpose high-level programming language so as to solve fundamental problems in different domains.

Key Skills:

• On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate: an ability to reason about the solution of general problems and apply different problem-solving techniques.

• Lectures enable the students to learn new material relevant to computational thinking.
• Practical classes enable the students to put into practice learning from lectures and strengthen their understanding through application (by implementing and applying algorithms in a general-purpose, high-level programming language).
• Students are assessed by formative and summative assessment and examinations.

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