Syllabus for Roster(s):

  • 15Sp CS 5014-001 (ENGR)
  • 15Sp CS 5014-002 (ENGR)
  • 15Sp CS 5014-003 (ENGR)
In the UVaCollab course site:   15Sp CS 5014 (ENGR)

Course Description (for SIS)

Many graduate students come to UVA with little or no programming experience.  At the same time their research often involves extensive use of computers, particularly for modeling and simulation. Without formal training they eventually learn to program, but often in an ad hoc, inefficient way. The result is a combination of reduced productivity and potentially lower quality research results. The goals of this 3-credit course are to enable students in the various disciplines to both understand the nature and limitations of computation and to become productive members of their research group’s computational science projects.

The first 10 weeks of the course will provide a foundation in the core abstractions in computational thinking using a programming language chosen by students (from a finite set) to use for the course. The basic programming abstractions will be framed in pseudo-code with weekly, language-specific lecture and lab sessions to demonstrate how these abstractions are implemented in the particular programming language.

In the last 4 weeks of the course, the class will divide into separate sections to cover domain-specific applications of the programming concepts acquired in the first part of the course. The types of domain-specific sections offered will depend on departmental participation in the content development, and determine which programming languages are taught in the first half of the course.

The anticipated language choices are Matlab, Mathematica, Python, and R.  Each section of the course will feature only one or two of the language choices.  Students registered for one section may be moved to another section, depending on their choice of programming language.

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