Fundamentals of Computer Science was taught for ten academic years to engineering students at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. The course combined foundational computer-science concepts with Matlab programming and engineering-oriented problem solving.
Educational approach
The objective was not to train specialist programmers, but to provide engineers with the concepts needed to understand information representation, algorithms, computer architecture and software, and to create programs tailored to technical problems.
Main topics
- Problem solving and algorithms
- Hardware, software and coding
- Computer architecture
- Programming languages
- Operating systems
- Matlab programming
- Floating-point representation
- Arrays, functions and loops
- Debugging and strings
- Sorting algorithms
- Sampling theorem and spectrum
- Computational complexity
- Data structures and file I/O
- Object-oriented programming
Course textbook
The teaching experience led to several editions of Fondamenti di Informatica, the companion exercise volume and finally the consolidated 2024 book Basi di Informatica — con Matlab ed esercizi, whose 21 chapters include a large collection of solved examination exercises.