46 courses with the subject COSC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
COSC 101Introduction for Computing I1.00
An introduction to computer science through the study of programming utilizing the programming language Python. Topics include program control, modular design, recursion, fundamental data structures including lists and maps, and a variety of problem-solving techniques. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Senior Recommended: Recommended for students in all disciplines who desire a rigorous introduction to computers and programming. Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
A weekly two-hour laboratory provides the opportunity to develop programming and design skills. Required corequisite to COSC 101. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None
A continuation of COSC 101 and the first course in the major. Develops advanced programming topics such as abstract data types and algorithms and their analyses. Abstract data structures may include lists, stacks, queues, and maps. The concepts of information hiding, data abstraction, and modular design are emphasized. Object-oriented programming is used throughout. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 102. This weekly two-hour laboratory includes the design and implementation of programs that illustrate the topics of the course. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
The goal of this course is to introduce students to how modern web applications are designed and created. Through lecture, discussion, and programming assignments, student learn programming constructs in Python, including variables and types, control flow, objects and classes; web front-end technologies such as HTML and CSS; and the Django web application framework. In addition to core software engineering and design topics, this course considers issues related to accessibility, sensitivity to culture and locale, and security and privacy. No prior programming experience is required. This course does not count toward the major. Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Computer Science/Mathematics, Computer Science Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 140. A weekly two-hour laboratory provides the opportunity to develop practical programming and design skills. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
A study of the fundamental concepts of computer architecture. Topics include the representation of information, components of the computer and how they interact, microarchitecture and microprogramming, conventional machine and assembly language, and advanced architectures. Several types of computer design are reviewed; an ARM architecture is the subject of detailed study. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 201. The laboratory is used to examine how different components of a computer's architecture can affect its performance. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Introduces foundational methods in the design and analysis of information-processing and problem-solving techniques. Asymptotic time and space complexity are used as an evaluation framework throughout. Data structures include maps, trees, and heaps. Algorithmic approaches include greedy, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and dealing with intractability. Graphs are used extensively, and important graph problems and their algorithms are examined closely.
A weekly two-hour laboratory in which students develop and practice skills for algorithmic reasoning, design, and analysis and improve mathematical and technical writing through a variety of collaborative exercises. Required corequisite to COSC 202 .
None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None Click here for Course Offerings by term
Corequisite
COSC 202
COSC 204Computing and Society1.0
Students attempt to understand and navigate the increasingly complex ethical landscape of issues embedded into and surrounding computer science. Along the way, students discover why ethics is an essential component of computer science and how historical and current power dynamics continue to shape ethical decision making in computing. Finally, students explore the responsibilities we have to our communities both as professional and citizen computer scientists. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
A study of the hardware and software infrastructure computer applications depend on. Topics include the C programming language, data storage and representation, hardware organization, assembly, storage devices, operating systems, and concurrency. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None
COSC 102 (Juniors and Seniors must also be declared majors and minors to register)
Corequisite
COSC 208L
COSC 208LIntroduction to Computer Systems Lab0.25
A weekly two-hour laboratory that focuses on the design, implementation, and analysis of computer systems and the applications that depend on them. Required corequisite to COSC 208 .
None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None Click here for Course Offerings by term
Corequisite
COSC 208
COSC 215Software Analysis and Testing1.0
No robust code can be written without employing the quintessential skills of software analysis and testing. Moreover, these skills are required by the profession, both as a software developer and tester. Coursework is designed to move our students' knowledge, understanding and practical skills from haphazard software testing and limited code analysis towards learning about and meeting the real world standards. It both teaches established methods of software analysis and testing, and how to apply them to real world software. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
COSC 102 (Seniors must also be declared majors or minors to register)
Corequisite
COSC 215L
COSC 215LSoftware Analysis and Testing Lab0.25
A weekly two-hour laboratory that focuses on the analysis, design and implementation of automated testing of real world software. Required corequisite to COSC 215. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
COSC 255LGadgets and Gizmos: the Hardware/Software Interface Lab
Required corequisite for COSC 255. Students work collaboratively to build embedded systems and practice implementing course concepts. Credits: .25 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Introduces discrete computational structures, methods, and concepts utilized throughout computer science. Topics include elementary knowledge of probability, linear algebra, graph theory, and number theory, as well as proof techniques such as induction and contradiction. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None Click here for Course Offerings by term
Corequisite
COSC 290
COSC 291Independent Study
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. This course may not count toward the major or the minor in Computer Science. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Introduces students to the study of operating systems. Topics include the hardware/software interface, scheduling, resource allocation, memory and storage management, thread synchronization, the scope and nature of services provided to applications, and system performance evaluation. Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Computer Science/Mathematics, Computer Science Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 301. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 304. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Investigates topics at the intersection of theoretical computer science and economics, in particular, issues that can be addressed with an interdisciplinary approach combining algorithmic reasoning about computation and efficiency with economic modeling of the agents involved. Examples include: solution concepts for computational tasks involving strategic agents; complexity of finding equilibria; market and auction design; and algorithmic mechanism design. Game theory and algorithmic complexity forms an analytic foundation used throughout. Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Computer Science/Mathematics, Computer Science Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required co-requisite to COSC 306. Focuses on algorithm implementation and simulation in computational settings involving strategic agents. Students develop programs to compute optimal (or approximately optimal) answers to example problems and to evaluate them according to metrics from the field of algorithmic game theory. Students also use their programs to conduct experiments to understand the role of
A study of the fundamental hardware of a computer, including the underlying digital electronics, the basic hardware of a computer, and some modern extensions such as graphical processing units. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
COSC 310LIntroduction to Computer Architecture Lab0.25
Required corequisite to COSC 310. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
A survey of influential topics in computer security and privacy with an emphasis on how they affect individuals and societies. Security topics include applied cryptography, identity management, network security, website security, operating systems security, and side channel attacks. Privacy topics include web tracking, anonymous browsing, database (de)anonymization, mobile and IoT data collection, contextual integrity, useable privacy, and privacy regulation. Students learn technical details of security and privacy vulnerabilities and defenses, practice programming and testing computer systems to detect and prevent vulnerabilities, and discuss the influence of human behavior and societal factors on security and privacy. Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. This course may not count towards the major or minor in Computer Science. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Provides a practical introduction to applied machine learning. Students engage in supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, including regression, support vector machines, decision trees, nearest neighbors, clustering, and ensemble methods. Students also learn deep learning techniques, including feedforward, convolutional, and recurrent neural networks. Emphasis is placed on understanding and gaining hands-on experience with machine learning for practical use. Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Computer Science/Mathematics, Computer Science Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Introduces students to the practice of software engineering by creating software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. An integral part of the course is for students working in small groups to take a Saas project from conception through planning, development, testing, and deployment. Student groups are normally paired with a local non-profit with a need that can be addressed through a new or modified Saas application. The project will be developed using a modern application framework (e.g., Ruby on Rails) and deployed using a cloud provider such as Heroku. Through the course and project, students will learn and use Agile methodologies and tools, including user stories, behavior- and test- driven development, pair programming, version control for team-based development, and continuous integration. Moreover, students will learn and apply fundamental programming constructs and techniques including design patterns for software architecture, higher-order functions, metaprogramming, and reflection, to improve the maintainability, modularity and reusability of their code. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite to COSC 425. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Language is an amazing and intricate human capacity and building computational systems that process human language (Natural Language Processing; NLP) has widespread applications: both practical (e.g., searching the internet, virtual assistants, chatbots, autocorrect, translation systems, audio captioning, and hate speech detectors) and scientific (e.g., as models of the human mind). Coursework has three interrelated goals. First, to develop the language and tools necessary for understanding, building, and evaluating NLP systems. Second, to engage in the scientific process by reading papers, replicating existing
Required corequisite to COSC 426. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Introduces the fundamental concepts in computer networks. Topics include layered network architecture, encoding, error detection and correction, medium access control, addressing schemes, routing, internetworking congestion control, quality-of-service, and network security. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Students complete weekly laboratory assignments in which they build network applications and conduct experiments in order to gain a deeper understanding of topics covered in class. Required corequisite to COSC 465. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics
Student learning is organized around three broad topic areas: 1) human-computer interaction design principles, 2) techniques for designing interactive systems, and 3) techniques for evaluating the efficacy of your designs. Topics may include user experience (UX) and interaction design (IxD), needfinding, rapid prototyping, identifying "Dark UX" patterns, cognitive task analysis, affinity diagramming, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, contextual inquiry, user interviews, surveys, wire-framing, and A/B Testing. Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Computer Science/Mathematics, Computer Science Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
Required corequisite lab for COSC 470. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Topics vary depending upon the needs of students and interests of the instructor. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Opportunity for research-based individual study under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Research methods in the particular area of study and investigation of current literature are also addressed. This course may count as one of the electives for the COSC major; this course may only be taken once for major credit. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
COSC 202 or COSC 208 or COSC 290 and permission of Instructor
Corequisite
None
COSC 491Independent Study
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. This course may not count towards the major or minor in Computer Science. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Students complete a novel and significant independent project that either advances the field of computer science or synthesizes computer science concepts and technologies to benefit specific communities, under the guidance of a Computer Science faculty member. To enroll students must: (1) successfully complete COSC 482, extend an independent project from a 400-level COSC course in an intervening semester or summer, or complete a summer research project, and (2) have the proposed project evaluated and approved by Computer Science faculty in the preceding semester or summer. This course is graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Students must present the work to Computer Science faculty toward the end of the semester and submit a written thesis describing the motivation, methodology, outcomes, and connections to previous work. This course may not count as one of the electives for the COSC major or minor.
