From Media Computation to Data Science

This course teaches media computation, a pedagogical idea which allows you to explore general purpose programming by playing with the building blocks of digital pictures, music, movies, and texts. You’ll learn how to analyze, manipulate, and create multimedia content using the visual programming language Snap!. The concepts and strategies learned for media can then be applied to other programming tasks and data sets from various sources. The course aims to bridge the gap between introductory programming and advanced computational skills.

• Examine – Building Blocks of Media
• Look Back - A Photographic Time Machine
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Raise Your Voice - The One Person Chorus
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Write Down - An Infinite Run-On Sentence
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Take Note - Scoring with Music
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Show Up - The Enchanted Mirror
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Downloads
• Assignment Week 1
• Enumerate – Numbers Are Everywhere
• Point Out - Becoming a Painting
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• True Colors - Drawing Texts and Sounds
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• On the Same Wavelength - Analyzing Sounds
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• The Sound of Numbers - Sound-Synthesis
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Grade by Grade - Working with RGB Colors
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Downloads
• Assignment Week 2
• Transform – Higher-Order Functions
• One Ring to Rule Them All
• Keep a Secret - Creating a Cipher Language
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Make It Short - Map, Keep, Combine
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Sounds Interesting - Experimenting with Audio Effects
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Pixel Art - Inventing Graphic Effects for Images
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• CGI - Applying Your Effect on Live Videos
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Downloads
• Assignment Week 3
• Transfer – It's All Just Data
• The Big Picture - Accessing Datasets
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Needles and Haystacks - Finding, Filtering, and Sorting Data
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Divide and Conquer - Grouping Data
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Thrilling Plot - Visualizing Frequency Distributions
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Informed Guess - Decrypting Secrets
• Exercise: Your Turn!
• Downloads
• Assignment Week 4