A media computation course for non-majors

Computing may well become considered an essential part of a liberal education, but introductory programming courses will not look like the way that they do today. Current CSI course are failing dramatically. We are developing a new course, to be taught starting in Spring 2003, which uses computation for communication as a guiding principle. Students learn to program by writing Python programs for manipulating sound, images, and movies. This paper describes the course development and the tools developed for the course. The talk will include the first round of assessment results.