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A comment on CS for All. Parent comment

Re:CS for All by mjn on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:15PM (#10036612)
I think it's a good idea, but fwiw it's not CS-specific. Harvey Mudd's idea isn't that CS is so uniquely important that everyone should take it, but rather than everyone should take a lot of things, regardless of major, and CS is one of those things. The curriculum is designed with a philosophy of fairly broad education, kind of in line with a liberal-arts college ideal, but with more of a STEM flavor. I was a CS major there, and only maybe 1/3 of my total course hours were CS: the split is roughly 1/3 in your major, 1/3 Common Core, and 1/3 "HSA" (humanities, social-science, and the arts). [1]

The technical part of the Common Core is currently: 1 course biology, 1 course CS, 1 course engineering, 1.5 courses chemistry (0.5 is a lab), 2.5 courses physics, 0.5 course elective lab, 3 courses mathematics.

[1] There's even a hokey triangle illustrating that philosophy in the course catalogue (p.26): https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/201...

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Re:CS for All by maxwelljoslyn on Monday August 10, 2015 @04:34PM (#10037107)
I didn't know "technical liberal-arts" colleges really existed. That's cool. As a student at a more traditional liberal-arts college[1], it's something I've thought about before.

[1] albeit one with a massively growing CS curriculum that is on track to be its own major, instead of part of the math department

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Re:CS for All by ForHackernews on Monday August 10, 2015 @04:41PM (#10037130)
FWIW, Harvey Mudd is part of the Claremont Consortium of five small liberal arts colleges, and it considers itself a liberal arts college: https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/

> We’re also unique because we are a liberal arts college.

Traditionally, the "liberal arts" include mathematics and physical sciences alongside arts, humanities and social sciences.

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Re:CS for All by PascLeRasc on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:27PM (#10036696)
What do they cover in the basic general engineering course?
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Re:CS for All by tathougies on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:36PM (#10036752)
The course covers signals and systems. We talk about ways of modeling physical and electrical systems (or any other system really) as combinations of smaller components, and use the characterizations we derive of the smaller systems to characterize behavior of the larger ones. We use tools like the fourier transform to simplify the analysis.

This wikibook seems to cover the same topics: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Signals_and_Systems

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Re:CS for All by bgribble on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:49PM (#10036829)
When I took it ~25 years ago it was called Intro to Systems Engineering, and covered the foundational principles of control systems design and analysis of linear dynamic systems. A lot of Laplace transforms, first- and second-order differential equations, relationships between time-domain and frequency-domain behavior, etc.
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Re:CS for All by modeless on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:56AM (#10039169)
The things I learned in the basic engineering course that really stuck with me were convolution, the sampling theorem, and the Fourier transform. That knowledge has been invaluable.
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