Computer Science

The International Internship course develops vital business skills employers are actively seeking in job candidates. This course is comprised of two parts: an internship, and a hybrid academic seminar. Students are placed in an internship within a sector related to their professional ambitions. The hybrid academic seminar, conducted both online and in-person, analyzes and evaluates the workplace culture and the daily working environment students experience. The course is divided into eight career readiness competency modules as set out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which guide the course’s learning objectives. During the academic seminar, students reflect weekly on their internship experience within the context of their host culture by comparing and contrasting their experiences with their global internship placement with that of their home culture. Students reflect on their experiences in their internship, the role they have played in the evolution of their experience in their internship placement, and the experiences of their peers in their internship placements. Students develop a greater awareness of their strengths relative to the career readiness competencies, the subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment, and how to build and maintain a career search portfolio.

This course introduces the concepts that serve as a basis for hundreds of programming languages. It provides a basic understanding and appreciation of the various essential programming-languages constructs, programming paradigms, evaluation criteria and language implementation issues. The course covers concepts from imperative, object-oriented, functional, logic, constraints, and concurrent programming. These concepts are illustrated by examples from varieties of languages such as Pascal, C, Java, Smalltalk, Scheme, Haskell, and Prolog. The course also introduces various implementation issues, such as pseudo-code interpretation, static and dynamic semantics, abstract machine, type inferencing, etc.

This course offers an introduction to mobile computing and the development of mobile applications. Students test the environment and components of mobile computing systems and build applications for smart clients.

This course provides critical viewpoints on innovation at three different levels. On the individual level, information technology developments enable super-large firms (e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook) to provide service to their paying customers. At the societal level, the course shows that information technology platforms (such as Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit) allow for evading taxes, laws, and stakeholder protections and could erode the societal achievements of the past 150 years. At the global level, the course demonstrates that technological innovation in industrialized countries impacts the economy in developing countries. 

Interactive objects are physical devices controlled by microcontrollers using simple sensors and actuators. The course provides students with skills, knowledge, and experience of designing and prototyping interactive physical objects using contemporary microcontrollers. The course covers basic electronics, control circuits, sensors (analogue and digital), output (analogue and digital), microcontrollers, simple networking, and microcontroller programming using the popular Arduino open-source platform. It additionally touches on topics of interaction design and evaluation to provide a framework in which students can prototype and understand interactive objects.