During the past few weeks of the computer science class, we’ve set some foundations for this course — setting online portfolio in WordPress blog — and began to touch the field of computer and computing system.
Basic Skills Used in the Course
How to Set up an Online Portfolio (WordPress Blog)
WordPress is the website that we’ll be using throughout the whole semester for blog posting, so studying to use this is quite necessary from the beginning. We learned how to set up a blog with a proper category and menus, posts attached to the categories, which I’ll introduce in the following.
Firstly, how to set a proper category.
- Go to “My Site – Settings – Writing – Categories”.
- Click “Add New Category”, type in the name of the category, and it’s done.
Secondly, how to set a proper menus.
- Go to “My Site – Customize – Menus – Primary”.
- “Add Items” in “Categories”, simply type the name of the menus, and it’s done.
Finally, how to attach posts to the right categories.
- Go to your post and click “Categories” under the column “Document” on the right.
- Tick the boxes of the categories to which you want to attach your post and it’s done.
Filling Student Information Database on the Class Website
In the specific website for designed our course, we completed the student information database with our basic information, for the convenience the teacher.
Computing System
Computer and its Components — Hardware and Software
Today, computers are all around us. From desktop computers to smartphones, they’re changing the way that we live our lives. But have you ever asked yourself, “What is a computer?”
GCF Learn Free, 2012
This is the first line of an introductory video clip on computers we watched during class. In this particular video, a computer is defined as “an electronic device that manipulates information, or ‘data’”. I was slightly surprised by the simplicity of this definition, according to which not only are the things we call “computers” (such as desktop and laptop computers) considered as computers but also smartphones.
Despite of all different types of computers, all of them are run by the computing system, in which computer hardware, software, and data interact to solve problems. Hardware is the physical elements of a computing system, for example, the printer, the monitor, and the keyboard. As for the software, it is the programs that provide the instructions for a computer to execute, telling the hardware what to do, such as a web browser and media player. It is these two parts and, most importantly, the computing system which make a computer operates and serves various purposes in our daily lives.
Layers of a Computing System
Before exploring the layers of a computing system, we watched another video clip, “Who Invented the Computer?”. Lots of legendary names showed up along the history of inventing the computer, such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and Konrad Zuse. However, the video eventually reached a conclusion that the computer was not invented by a single person, but many, each influenced and inspired by each other. The idea of people working step by step, supporting one another, and finally making a creation that benefits all mankind with the combination of their intelligence and imagination truly amazed me.
Through a few generations of development of computers and computing systems, today, a computing system includes 6 layers. The information layer is the innermost layer, which reflects the way we represent information on a computer — using binary digits, 1 and 0. The second layer, hardware, consists of the physical hardware of a computer. It includes devices such as gates, circuits, monitor, and lots of other physical components. The third layer is the programming layer, which deals with software, the instructions used to accomplish computations and manage data. Then, it’s the operating systems (OS). It helps manage the computer’s resources, help us interact with the computer system and manage the way hardware devices, programs, and data interact. Some of the most often used operating systems include Windows 8 and Mac OS X. All these 4 layers discussed above are inner layers, which focus on making a computer system work. The other two layers are the application and communication layers. The former focuses on using the computer to solve specific real-world problems, running application programs to make use of the computer’s abilities in other domains, while the latter, as written in its name, helps us to communicate with others’ computers by connecting computers into networks to share information and resources. One common example of the communication device is the Worlds Wide Web (www), which makes the communication easier in a great extent. A computer isn’t able to run without the 4 inner layers, but most of our usage of computers today rely on the 2 outer layers, such as chatting and posting on social medias. Therefore, all these layers are essential to the function of a computer .
The General Model of All Computing Systems
Despite of various types of computers being used nowadays, the same general model is being used by all modern computers — input, process, and output. A system receives an input, processes the information, and performs an output.
What I found quite interesting through our in-class discussion was that this model doesn’t only apply to computers and its devices, but to lots of other systems in real-life as well. Take a fan for example. When an input, a press on a button to turn on or off a certain degree of wind, is received by the fan, it processes the signal and prepare to spin the wind blades, then the output of blades spinning and wind blowing is performed.
Computing Hardware (Presentation)
After the intense knowledge about computers and computing systems, the class was divided into groups to research and create online presentation about computer hardware. There are five groups of computer hardware in total: input devices, processing devices, output devices, storage devices, and communication devices. Our group was dealing with the last one, communication devices, which are extremely important in our daily lives, as people nowadays can’t really live without WiFi or 4G network. We researched on several common communication devices such as modem and bluetooth.
https://show.zohopublic.com/publish/d2ak3a6be65a506464545a65d3ae58b7e7850 (this is the public link to our presentation)
In these weeks, we built up the basic skills needed in class and learned about computer and the computing system. Through the classes, we began to have an idea of how computer science is strongly related to our life and how much it matters. Computers are the past, present, and the future as well.
Sophia's Blog for CS 