| 1.1 | What is a program? |
| 1.2 | What is an algorithm? |
| 1.3 | What is memory used for in a computer? |
| 1.4 | What type of computer scientist studies how recipes are written? What type of computer scientist studies how to make a computer think? What type of computer scientist studies the units used in recipes? |
| 1.5 | What is Moore's Law? What does it have to do with computers getting faster and cheaper? |
| 1.6 | Every profession uses computers today. Use a Web browser and a search engine like Google to find sites that relate your field of study with computer science or computing or computation. For example, search for "biology computer science" or "management computing."
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| 1.7 | Look in the classified section of your newspaper. What kinds of jobs can people get with a degree in computer science? How much money do they make? How many jobs are available? |
| 1.8 | Go to http://www.howstuffworks.com and find out how digital cameras work. |
| 1.9 | Go to http://www.howstuffworks.com and find out how digital recording and CDs work. |
| 1.10 | Go to http://www.howstuffworks.com and find out how remote entry devices work. |
| 1.11 | Find an ASCII table on the Web: A table listing every character and its corresponding numeric representation. Write down the sequence of numbers whose ASCII values make up your name. |
| 1.12 | Find a Unicode table on the Web. What's the difference between ASCII and Unicode? How many bytes does each use to represent a character? |
| 1.13 | Consider the representation for pictures described in Section 1.3, where each "dot" (pixel) in the picture is represented by three bytes, for the red, green, and blue components of the color at that dot. How many bytes does it take to represent a 640 x 480 picture, a common picture size on the Web? How many bytes does it take to represent a 1,024 x 768 picture, a common screen size? (What do you think is meant now by a "3 megapixel" camera?) |
| 1.14 | How many digits are used in the binary number system? How many digits are used in the decimal number system? How would you represent 3, 5, 8, and 13 in the binary number system? |
| 1.15 | What is the hexadecimal number system? How many digits are used in the hexadecimal number system? How would you represent 4, 18, 33, and 64 in this number system? |
| 1.16 | What is the octal number system? How many digits are used in the octal number system? How would you represent 4, 18, 33, and 64 in this number system? |
| 1.17 | How many digits are in one byte? How many different numbers can be represented by one byte? What if you have two bytes? Four bytes? |
| 1.18 | How would you represent negative numbers in bytes? Do a search on the Web for "negative numbers" and see what you find. |
| 1.19 | How might you represent a floating point number in terms of bytes? Do a search on the Web for "floating point" and see what you find. |
| 1.20 | Look up Alan Kay and the Dynabook on the Web. Who is he, and what does he have to do with media computation? |
| 1.21 | Look up Alan Turing on the Web. Who was he, and what does he have to do with our notion of what a computer can do and how encodings work? |
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| 1.22 | Look up Kurt Goedel on the Web. Who was he, and what amazing things did he do with encodings? |
