CS&E 204 introduces students to computing ideas (including programming) in a fun, interesting context. The context here is creating and manipulating digital images such as the student's own photographs, plus sounds and simple animations. Two of the four classes per week meet in a computer laboratory setting, where students learn hands-on while working with a student partner on a creative project involving manipulation of digital media. The other two weekly meetings are spent discussing various topics related to how digital media are represented and stored inside the computer and how they can be manipulated by writing simple programs to produce interesting effects (such as those that may be obtained with Photoshop or similar expensive, high-end applications). The course does not use off-the-shelf software such as Photoshop to manipulate images, but rather teaches students how they can program the computer to perform such manipulations. Sample assignments include writing a program to create a collage of various images where some of the images have been transformed in interesting ways (e.g., made negative, posterized, reflected, etc.), and to create interesting sound bites by combining pieces from other sounds and adjusting pitch and volume.
The official syllabus is available here.
A gallery of some of the image collages created by past students in CSE 204 is available here.