Introduce students to computer programming and application development.

Course goals:

Stimulating the student's curiosity with respect to the computer; analyzing business problems for the purpose of developing computer solutions; and articulating a process to develop solutions to these business problems in the form of computer programs.

This course will introduce students to the software development lifecycle (specification, design/planning, implementation/coding, testing), and the major paradigms for software development. A major portion of the course will be dedicated to learning the basics of structured and object-oriented programming in Java. The course will culminate with a software development team project, which will simulate the process used by a team of software development consultants.

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and explain the majors aspects of an object-oriented computer program
• Analyze a business problem/situation and describe the process of building a computer program to solve the business problem.
• Implement a business application with a computer program.

Pre-requisite expectations:

This is a first course in computer programming, and there are no formal pre-requisites for this class. Moreover, if you have previously taken Java programming (e.g. in high school), you should probably take CS111 instead of CS108. The only expectation of students' computer skills before taking this class is to be comfortable with using email, web browsing, and copying and pasting text. In addition, familiarity with high school-level algebra (e.g. MA 118) is assumed.