From Media Computation to Data Science

Ever wanted to turn your own voice into a musical instrument? Ever wished for your sunset pics to be more awesome than your holidays? Ever wondered how to engage your students with “Big Data” and “higher-order functions”? Join us for the bright side of computer science!

Media Computation is a new way to learn general purpose programming by playing with the ingredients of our favorite pictures, music, movies and books.

And the good news is: Once we’ve had all the fun in the world, we already know everything we need to dive into the funky stuff of data science!

In this 4-week course you’ll learn how to analyze, transform, and generate multi-media content using a programming language rather than a word processor, photo editor, or music mixer. And then you just use it on data. The very same strategies, programming concepts, and notional models that are useful for hacking media are also useful for other programming tasks and can even be directly applied to data sets from other sources and contexts. This course aims to bridge the gap from introductory programming to more advanced computational competencies.