ITIS 1212 is the first attempt in our Department to teach an intro programming course that is aimed at our students. In the past, our students have taken ITCS 1212, the intro to programming course taught in the Computer Science Dept. Their course is a traditional course that teaches students procedural programming in C, using the standard word and math problems as examples.

Our version, ITIS 1212, is based on the Media Computation model pioneered by Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson at Geogia Tech, but with a twist, we are flipping the class. First, what is media computation? It is the use of media artifacts (pictures, sounds, movies) as the basis for teaching computational thinking. For example, to teach students about arrays and for loops, we have students iterate through an array of image pixels, changing each pixel’s red value to change the warmth of the image. Media computation has been around for awhile and has worked well for the non-engineering students at Georgia Tech (engineering students typically do just fine in the traditional class).

See how this source picture is transformed with various algorithms (tiling, quatrefoil, vertical blinds, horizontal blinds):