Undergraduate Qatar Computing Science 2020-2021

This course will be delivered in two halves. The first half will provide a self-contained introduction to computer programming. It will be accessible to all undergraduates. Students will be exposed to the basic principles of computer programming, e.g. fundamental programming techniques, concepts, algorithms and data structures. The course contains lectures where the principles are systematically developed. As the course does not presuppose knowledge of these principles, we start from basic intuitions. The second half will be particularly of use to those studying Science and Engineering subjects, broadly interpreted, as well as Computing and IT specialists. It will include a gentle introduction to professional issues and security concepts.

This course will introduce students to techniques that support problem solving and modelling with computers, and concepts and methods that are fundamental to computing science. The techniques and concepts will be illustrated with numerous computing examples.

Beginning with digital logic gates and progressing to the design of combinational and sequential circuits, this course use these fundamental building blocks as the basis for what follows: the design of an ARM microprocessor. In addition, students will get hands on experience with programming using ARM assembly language which is the inner language spoken by the processor. By the end of the course, students will have a top-to-down understanding of how a microprocessor works. The course is taught without prerequisites; students are taught with plenty of exercises from lectures, tutorials, practical and tests every week.

This course will build on the basic programming skills acquired in the first half-session and equip the students with advanced object oriented programming knowledge, implementation of data structure and algorithms, and basic software engineering techniques. The students will be challenged with more complicated programming problems through a series of continuous assessments.