Introduction to Computer Science

The Introduction to Computer Science course always has a lot of fun creating various kinds of useful, fun, or just plain weird programs. All programming for the 1998-99 courses was done using Sun's Java Development Kit (JDK).

One interesting program which the students created was a program which parsed the text of a poem and created its own randomly-generated poem, whose words were weighted by the frequency of the occurence of word pairs in the source poem. The following is a sample of the program's output; the source poem used was the entire text of Beowulf:

With sorrow; let her son to hasten away.
From Aeschere was never be dealt, grim foe against his
keenness of high hall uprear, O realm-warder! No sager
counsel how that earl have sometimes seen and savage, for
slaughtered lay a daring achieved. Grave were melted, loving
friends, from resting-places, place of combat, outward go,

by day the warden's wrath of the well-chased sword,
far fields enfolded in woe for all welcome guests to aid,

wrought unceasing, Grendel's hand: nor harness gray,
spirit and gleaming sword thy triumph! No light chose help
long.

Students in Math 18 all work on a project which produces ray-traced images. The instructor (Shults) provides a lot of the code to do the mathematics and the students only have to put it together. Erik Christensen (a student from the Fall 1997 class) extended this program for his final project. His program made objects shiny and reflective and also moved the source of light. The image shown here was produced by his program.

For their final project, students are assigned to create some kind of program which combines the skills which they have learned in the course. Possible topics include a budget program, a grade tracking and reporting program, or any other kind of program which requires a similar level of programming.