75969 - Basic Informatics (1) (M-Z)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this course, the student will have a basic knowledge of computer science, having learned the working principles of software systems, and understanding the technical lexicon of the discipline. The student will also grasp the fundamental concepts about design and implementation of multimedia systems, especially in World Wide Web environment.

Course contents

The course is organised in 10 lectures. For each lecture, it is provided an historical context and some of the most relevant people, according to the topic of the lecture, are introduced. The topics of the lectures are:

• Computer science technologies in the Humanities
  - Digital projects on Humanities studies
  - Markup and digital editions
  - Data collections

• Computer, computational thinking and data structures [historic people: Charles Babbage]
  - What is a computer?
  - Computational thinking
  - Data structures
  
• Algorithms and computability [historic people: Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing]
  - Uses of the Analytical Machine
  - What is an algorithm
  - Flowcharts
  - Our first algorithm
  - Are there limits to computation?
• Programming languages [historic people: Noam Chomsky and Grace Hopper]
  - What is a language?
  - Programming languages
  - Visual languages
  
• What it happens when we click on a link: the World Wide Web [historic poeple: Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, and Tim Berners-Lee]
  - Introduction
  - The birth of the hypertexts
  - The creation of the World Wide Web
  - Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
  - The browsers: what they are and why they are useful
• What it happens when we click on a link: communication protocols [historic people: Tim Berners-Lee]
  - Introduction
  - What is a communication protocol?
  - How the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) works
  - What is a web server?
• What it happens when we click on a link: the Internet [historic people: Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider]
  - Introduction
  - The birth of the Internet
  - Communication packets
  - What is the Internet Protocol (IP)?
  - Domain Name Server (DNS) and the router
• What it happens when we click on a link: Transferring information over the Internet [historic people: Claude Shannon, Vinton Cerf, and Robert Kahn]
  - Introduction
  - Byte and bit: unit of information
  - What is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)?
  - Other protocols used on the Internet
  - Full scenario describing a request of a webpage
• What it happens when we click on a link: The webpages
  - Markup languages
  - Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): a brief narration
  - Main HTML elements
  - Separation between markup and presentation: the CSS
• Wrap-up

Readings/Bibliography

The lecture material, including the lecture notes written by the professor and the related slides, will be made available on the platform Virtuale before the beginning of the course. All the material provided will be in Italian. Studying the material is sufficient for passing the exam with the maximum score.

Teaching methods

The course is structured in 10 lectures with the professor, where he will introduce the topics of the course. The topics must be approprately studied individually using the e-learning environments shared by the professor. Each lecture with the professor will be about on one of the topics of the programme.

Assessment methods

The final exam is structured in one test with questions. Each test is composed by 33 questions with multiple answers. Each quesion answered correctly scores 1, while a question not answered or answered incorrectly scores 0. Each exam session is organised in multiple turns of one hour each. Within a turn, the student has 45 minutes to complete the test.

The final score is the number of correct answers. If such a number is greater than 30, the score is 30 cum laude. In particular:

• excellent evaluation (final score greater than 26): reaching an in-depth knowledge of all the course topics, including the theoretical part and the computational thinking part;
• sufficient evaluation (final score between 18 and 26): reaching an appropriate knowledge of several course topics, even if there are still a lack in some aspects related to either the theoretical part or the computational thinking part (or both);
• insufficient evaluation (final score lesser than 18): the knowledge of the course topics, considering both the theoretical part and the computational thinking part, is not appropriate.

Teaching tools

The teaching will be in blended learning: part with the professor (10 lectures in a classroom) and part using one or more e-learning environment made available. The professor works in collaboration witha tutor.

It is possible to communicate directly with either the professor or the tutor via e-mail.

Links to further information

https://ivanhb.it/basic_inf_course

Office hours

See the website of Ivan Heibi