Close Menu

COMP1126

Course Title: 
Introduction to Computing I
Credits: 
3
Educational Level: 
I
Semester offered: 
I & II
Associated Programme: 
B.Sc. CS; B.Sc. IT
Core Course: 
yes
Course Aims: 

This course is intended to lay the foundations for developing good problem solving skills within students of Computing. It is not aimed at teaching any particular programming language or paradigm per se. The ideas covered in this course will be revisited in more detail in a variety of courses in the subsequent part of the Information Technology/Computer Science major. As a consequence, no knowledge of programming is assumed as a prerequisite to this course, yet at the end of the course students would have been exposed in a concrete way to computation, and the tools that have been developed to control its complexity as well as implement its processes in physical devices. This course therefore serves as one of the cornerstone courses of the entire curriculum for the Information Technology programme and the Computer Science major, and requires only that students come to it prepared to think in ways unfamiliar to them.

Syllabus: 
  1. History of Programming Languages: Brief survey of programming paradigms.
  2. Building Abstractions.
  3. Computational Processes:
    • Primitive Operations,
    • Special Forms for naming,
    • conditional execution,
    • Procedures as sequences of operations,
    • Recursion and Iteration,
    • Lexical scoping and Nested Procedures.
  4. Higher-order Procedures: Customising Procedures with procedural arguments.
  5. Creating new functions at run-time.
  6. Compound Data: Pairs and Lists.
Course Assessment: 
  • Final Exam (2 hours long)   60%
  • Coursework     40%
    • 1 written assignment/ programming project     15%
    • 1 in-course test (1 hr)   10%
    • 5 labs     10%
    • 1 quiz     5%

Students will be required to pass both the coursework and the final examination to pass the course.

Course Prerequisites: 

Anyone of the following:

  • A CAPE (Units 1 and 2 {or A-level}) Science subject;
  • ECON1003;
  • Teacher’s College Diploma or Associate Degree in Mathematics or Science
  • Or Information Technology
Top of Page