CMPS 1023.101 INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTING for SCIENCE MAJORS

Instructor: Richard P. Simpson, Bolin 126E; Tel.: 397-4191;

email : richard.simpson@mwsu.edu Time : MWF 11:00am

Assistant: Rrezarta Krasniqi

Text: No text, We will be using OER(Open Educational Recources, Educause)

Prerequesites: A reasonable knowledge of College Algebra

Open Educational Resources: OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.3 Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Hewlett Report)

General: This course is designed as a first course in computing for Science Majors. It's focus will be on the techniques and software that support the writing of scientific papers. Each student will be led thru the process of researching, data analysis, data graphing, image processing, paper writing and presentation of a topic from the students major. These papers will follow the format of a known journal format such as that required by Association of Computing Machinery and the American Chemical Society. There are style plugins that now work with Microsoft Word for these organizations.

Course Content: The material which constitutes this course will include lectures, software tutorials, films, and homework. Students are responsible for all material regardless of class attendance. The class will meet in BSH 103 laboratory where hands on work will be done with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other software. In addition to the above we will work with the well-known scripting language Perl. This language has become quite popular in Medicine and Biology. We will use it to process large files such as that found in DNA sequences. Each student will be required to research a topic in their field and write a paper on this topic following one of the above journal formats. The student will also be required to give a powerpoint presentation on the topic.

Course Grade Calculation
20%	Major Examinations (2) 10 % each
20%	Final Exam (1)
30%	Homework & Projects
10%	In Class projects (ICP's)
10%	Power Point
10%	Paper

Attendance: Attendance will be taken at each class meeting by having students sign a roll sheet. Many of the classes will have an in class exercise that is turned in. If you are not in class you will not get credit for these exercises. A few of the in-class exercise grades will be dropped to allow for a few special circumstances. In otherwords it is very important that you attend every class and arrive on time. If late arrivals become a problem then the teacher will be forced to fix the situation. Capice?!

Homework: Assignments be regularly given to be done outside of class either in the labs on campus or at home on the students personal computer. All homework assignments must be turned in at the beginning of the class period in which they are due. Late homework will be penalized. Not turning in the homework will result in a severe reduction of the students grade.

Paper: A paper will be assigned that will concern itself with a specific topic in each students major. For example if you are a chemistry major you may research and write a paper on the molecular structure, application and future of Fullerenes(Buckyballs, carbon nanotubes). The format for this paper will be specified later in the course.

Powerpoint: A set of powerpoint slides covering the above topic will be required. This presentation should be suitable for for giving a short 15 minute presentation(eight slides) over the paper you wrote.

Laboratory: There is no official laboratory. We will use the lab in class and homework can be carried out on the students home computer or in one of the labs on campus.

NOTE: All students should refer to the current MSU Student Handbook and Activities Calendar for university policies related to class attendance, academic dishonesty, student responsibilities, rights and activities.

The following is presently under construction so don't take this as gospel.

SUPPORTING Papers, books and other documentation of interest.

• Interesting Applications or Tools
  • MWSnap: A free and useful screen capture utility I use quite often. This is how I copied computer output and the calculator images into my documents! Very useful for creating awesome powerpoints.
  • hd(Hexdump): For dumping a file in hexadecimal format. Lets you see whats under the hood!
  • Notepad++ : a really cool editor that you can use to write perl programs in color.
• Perl SUPPORT
  • How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project by Lincoln Stein
  • The BioPerl web site ( A toolkit of perl modules useful in building bioinformatics solutions in PERL)
• DNA References
  • Some example Perl apps within a course. Parts 1 and II have the .pl files
• Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc
• Perl Pocket Reference by Johan Vromans by O'Reilly
• Homo neanderthalensis mitochrondrial dna
• NCBI website.
• Bioinformatics
  • A French site of online analysis tools (also includes some tutorials)
• Molecular Visualization Resources
• World Index
• MolviZ Top 5
• Cool Sites for the pure joy of it!
  • AdobeCards
  • Roman Numerals
  • Mayan Calendar (What does your birthday look like in using the Mayan Dating Method
• Presentation Thoughts
  • Extreme Presentation Method