CSE 101 Lecture 1: Unit 1: What is Computational Thinking - 1
9 Jun 2018
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Department
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Professor
Computer science is all about using computers and computing technology to solve challenging,
real-world problems in science, medicine, business, and society
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Although computer programming is an important aspect of computer science, it would be wrong
to say that "computer science equals computer programming"
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Rather, computer programs often provide (parts of) the solutions to challenging technological
problems
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Computer literacy
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Computer maintenance/repair
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Computer science is also not:
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What is Computer Science?
Electronic health records are becoming increasingly important as time goes on
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What data will be stored? How? In what format?
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How will the data be accessed and displayed?
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Who will have access? How will the data be secured?
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How will the data be backed up and preserved?
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Consider some of the issues (technical and otherwise) that would arise in solving the problem of
providing a hardware/software system to medical professionals and other people who need
access to digital medical records:
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Answering these questions requires computational thinking
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A Modern Computing Problem
Computational thinking refers to how computer scientists think -- how they reason and work
through problems
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Computer theory areas: algorithms, data structures -- these are the heart and soul of
computer science
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Computer systems areas: hardware design, operating systems, networks
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Computer software and applications: software engineering, programming languages,
computer graphics, databases, simulation, artificial intelligence
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Computer science encompasses many sub-disciplines that support the general goal of solving
problems
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A major goal of this course is to help develop your computational thinking and problem solving
skills
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What is Computational Thinking?
Suppose we have a deck of cards we want to put in order
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This is the important problem of sorting that arises very frequently in computer science
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To keep things simple, let's just use the Ace through 9 of Hearts
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We are given: 5, 3, 6, A, 7, 4, 8, 2
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But we want: A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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Imagine you wanted to explain to a young child how to put the cards in order. What steps would
you give?
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One technique is called selection sort
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It repeatedly searches for and swaps cards in the list
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A, 3, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 2
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First, find the smallest item and exchange it with the card in the first position
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A, 2, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 3
Now, find the second-smallest item and exchange it with the card in the second position
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A Classical Problem: Sorting Data
Unit 1 - What is Computational Thinking?
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
3:58 PM
CSE 101 Page 1
