Course Summary

Ever wanted to turn your own voice into a musical instrument? Ever wished for your sunset pics to be more awesome than your holidays? Ever wondered how to engage your students with “Big Data” and “higher-order functions”? Join us for the bright side of computer science!

Media Computation is a new way to learn general purpose programming by playing with the ingredients of our favorite pictures, music, movies and books.

And the good news is: Once we’ve had all the fun in the world, we already know everything we need to dive into the funky stuff of data science!

In this 4-week course you’ll learn how to analyze, transform, and generate multi-media content using a programming language rather than a word processor, photo editor, or music mixer. And then you just use it on data. The very same strategies, programming concepts, and notional models that are useful for hacking media are also useful for other programming tasks and can even be directly applied to data sets from other sources and contexts. This course aims to bridge the gap from introductory programming to more advanced computational competencies.

Here is what some participants are saying about the course:

I have to admit, that I probably spent far too much time tweaking some of the content presented in the course, But it was definitely worthwhile, or as somebody would have called it: Hard Fun! read the original post

I want to thank you for your entushiasm: the videos were very fun to watch especially when you were experimenting with sounds and creating visual effects while giving us examples from our daily lives... read the original post

I wish this course could go on forever. The lecture videos were informative, clear, active, thoughtful constructed and fun...read the original post

Course Characteristics

• Starting from: September 22, 2020, 09:00 UTC. (What does this mean?)
  
• Duration: 4 weeks (4-8 hours per week, depending on the time you invest for the exercises)
• Final exam: October 20, 2020, 9:00 UTC – October 28, 2020, 9:00 UTC
• Course language: English
• How is an openSAP course structured?

Course Content

Week 1: Examine – Building Blocks of Media
Week 2: Enumerate – Numbers Are Everywhere
Week 3: Transform – Higher-Order Functions
Week 4: Transfer – It's All Just Data
Week 5: Final Exam

Target Audience

• Educators in computer and media sciences
  
• Anyone who is interested in learning about the building blocks of digital media
  
• People looking for an alternative approach to programming and data science
  

Course Requirements

• An understanding of basic programming concepts
  
• Familiarity with the Snap! development environment – we recommend the introductory exercise in this course: open.sap.com/courses/snap1-1

Development Systems

For this course you need a modern web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. If you have an unstable internet connection, you might want to download Snap! here: https://snap.berkeley.edu/offline