Q: Why is this course necessary for my high school student?
Whether your student is motivated purely by the pursuit of knowledge, or by an opportunity to secure an internship at a prestigious lab or firm, the CS curricula offered in this course will provide him or her the ability to speak with confidence about the most current programming languages that drive the technologies we use today, as well as the skills to contribute meaningfully to high-level projects in the sciences and engineering. We will be using real-world data samples and usage test cases for your student to use to create projects that can be shared publicly to help them establish their digital footprint.
Q: Who teaches this program?
The data science portion of the program will be led by computational neuroscientists from the Salk Institute. These scientists will model this program on the bootcamps that they currently teach to freshmen and sophomores at UCSD. The HTML/JS/CSS/PHP portions of the program will be taught by Catherine Eng, who has extensive experience developing web applications for image and data visualizations. These are the languages that are used to create enterprise level commerce and websites such as google.com, shutterfly.com, facebook.com, and instagram.com to name just a few. This part of the program will provide students experience with both front-end development as well as backend server administration and database development.
Q: What will my student gain out of the program?
Your student will not only develop hands-on coding skills in a variety of the most important programming languages, but will become conversant in how these technologies are implemented, the programs required to run them, and understand their applications in the real world.
Q: How will this program benefit my student’s college applications?
Colleges are looking for students who have not only had some coding experience via camps and online courses, but who have actually created published, high-level applications. This program will give your students not only hands-on experience with coding, but also solid end-results which will help them to establish a history of development progress on social / engineering platforms such as Github and StackOverflow.
Q: What if my child is younger than the recommended age and/or has not yet completed all the course prerequisites?
Please fill out the questionnaire anyway, and describe the reason for your interest in the program as well as any additional studies your student may have undertaken which may help qualify them for this class.
Q: Are there scholarships available?
Yes, please indicate in the remarks what would make this class affordable for you. As you know, Matlab and other bootcamp courses typically cost $1400 – $2000 a day, but we are committed to providing the same level of instruction to your student far more affordably. Please feel free to contact me directly for more information.
Q: What classes are offered and when?
June 28-June 29: Data Science I & II This is an introduction to programming languages commonly used in data science including JS, python, and authoring environments like Octave (the open-source alternative to Matlab) We will be teaching matrix operations by constructing image filters and animations and constructing a visualization from data sets.
July 2-3: Code Your Own Instagram This course teaches HTML/PHP/JS/JQuery and a fast-paced version of the course described here.
July 5-6: Code Your Own Coloring Book This course teaches HTML/PHP/JS/JQuery and a fast-paced version of the course described here.
Q: Where will classes be held?
Classes will be held at the UC San Diego Price Center. We will meet on the steps near the Triton statue starting at 8:45 each morning.