Help with Creative Computing Degree!

thetalker

Hi I'm in sixth year and interested in creative computing. Does anyone know more about the course, where it can get you and if its worth it?

Thanks in advance. :P

leatherjacket

Hi, I did the creative computing course when it was named differently (Multimedia Systems/Web Engineering). The material is basically the same.

It is a very general IT course that focuses on web development although it touches on almost everything such as:

• Programming, & lots of it!
• Networking and networking systems
• The entire Adobe creative suite (Audio, image & video processing)
• Databases & Data structures
• Entrepreneurship with IT
• Building scalable web applications
• Computer Hardware & Architecture
• CPU Architecture
• Physical computing (Basically building robots)

You'll be using programming languages & markup such as:

• Java, java & more java! (First year only to get a grasp on programming)
• Html/CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• Android (Basically Java)
• More languages and can choose others not covered in the course

What's nice is they let you really do your own thing in 3rd and 4th year. For your final project you can choose basically any area and any language. I did Automatic License Plate recognition using Python & Open CV for example. They don't teach this but they encourage finding out and teaching yourself in areas you like. Lots of people in my year did Machine Learning as a final project.

If you enjoy tinkering with computers and don't know what field of IT to get into, this course really covers it all in a broad sense and you can focus in your last 2 years what interests you the most.

Overall I recommend it highly. Lecturers are dead on and you'll get to know them all fairly early on as it's a nice community.

thetalker

Hi thanks! You've answered 90% of what I was wondering.
Just another thing, a friend of mine said knowing math and algorithms are crucial in comp science, would they be on the course or is that a more advanced field?

leatherjacket

thetalker wrote: »

Hi thanks! You've answered 90% of what I was wondering.
Just another thing, a friend of mine said knowing math and algorithms are crucial in comp science, would they be on the course or is that a more advanced field?

There was a maths module in 1st & 3rd year but honestly it was nothing much. If you're doing ordinary maths in school, you'll be absolutely fine. If you're doing higher, it will be nothing to you. It's nothing like the maths involved in say a CS course in Trinity/UCD.

There's a lot of material that you'll find you already did in school and there's some new stuff such as 'Projectiles', but they'll treat it as if you're ****e at maths in general and bring you from there. They even have extra classes that you have the option to attend after hours if you find you're struggling. They used to call them 'clinics' but I'm not sure now.

jimmycrackcorm

thetalker wrote: »

Hi thanks! You've answered 90% of what I was wondering.
Just another thing, a friend of mine said knowing math and algorithms are crucial in comp science, would they be on the course or is that a more advanced field?

Maths isn't used very much in the vast majority of computing. Consider how much maths was involved in adding the 'like' button on Facebook. Even banking software is basically adding/subtracting money with a little multiplication thrown in for interest calculation.

Of course, if you want to write something to simulate real life physical motion for a 3D game you'll have a heavy dependency on maths. However, if you're coming up with the next Twitter then let followers = followers +1 is as significant as it gets.