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Course Description

Overview

The main objective of this course is to lay a foundation for business students to develop computational thinking and analytical skills. Computational thinking involves solving problems by formulating them clearly and systematically, so that we can effectively leverage the power of computational tools and models. It is increasingly being recognized that computational thinking and programming are fundamental skills for everyone, not just for students interested in technology careers 1. Adopting a learning-through-examples approach, the course focuses on developing fluency with computational concepts and programming in a business context. Students will learn the fundamentals of computational thinking and apply them using Python and R programming languages. An additional pedagogical objective of the course is to pave a path for students to build on the fundamental skills and proceed with confidence to advanced data analysis and machine learning workflows using various open-source libraries available in the Python and R ecosystems. This is an extensively hands-on course, and major components of students’ grades are based on their individual submissions for the course’s assignments and projects. The course follows a mastery-based learning approach and corresponding grading approach. No prior programming experience is required to enroll in the course.

Learning Objectives

Students who complete this course are expected to develop skills and working knowledge related to:

  • Basic computational thinking and data analytics
  • Python and R programming languages
  • Automation for working with multiple data files and other unstructured formats (e.g., text)
  • Programmatic collection and organization of data for business analysis
  • Presentation and visualization for conveying data-driven insights

  1. For further information and inspiration on computational thinking, readers are referred to: (1) Wolfram, S. “How to teach computational thinking,” https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/09/how-to-teach-computational-thinking/ ; and Wing, J.M. “Computational Thinking,” Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 2006. ↩