Introduction to Computer Science

Course Overview

We have many goals for this course. Our primary goal is for you to learn to appreciate and use the fundamental design principles of modularity and abstraction in a variety of contexts from electrical engineering and computer science. To achieve this goal, we will study electrical engineering (EE) and computer science (CS) largely from the perspective of how to build systems that interact with, and attempt to control, an external environment. Such systems include everything from low-level controllers like heat regulators or cardiac pacemakers, to medium-level systems like automated navigation or virtual surgery, to high-level systems that provide more natural human-computer interfaces. Our second goal is to show you that making mathematical models of real systems can help in the design and analysis of those systems; and to give you practice with the difficult step of deciding which aspects of the real world are important to the problem being solved and how to model them in ways that give insight into the problem. We also hope to engage you more actively in the educational process. Most of the work of this
course will not be like typical problems from the end of a chapter. You will work individually and in pairs to solve problems that are deeper and more open-ended. There will not be a unique right answer. Argument, explanation, and justification of approach will be more important than the answer. We hope to expose you to the ubiquity of trade-offs in engineering design: it is rare that an approach will be best in every dimension; some will excel in one way, others in a different way. Deciding how to make such trade-offs is a crucial part of engineering. Another way in which we hope to engage you in the material is by having many of you return to the course as lab assistants in future semesters. Having a large number of lab assistants in the class means that students can be given more open-ended problems, and have people around to help them when they are stuck. Even more importantly, the lab assistants are meant to question the students as they go; to challenge their understanding and help them see and evaluate a variety of approaches. This process is of great intellectual value to student and lab assistant alike. Finally, of course, we have the more typical goals of teaching exciting and important basic material from electrical engineering and computer science, including modern software engineering, linear systems analysis, electronic circuits, and decision-making. This material all has an internal elegance and beauty, as well as crucial role in building modern EE and CS systems.

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