Splash Biography

Have you ever wondered how your computer turns cat videos on YouTube into images that appear on your screen? Or how that video can be sent over from the Internet in the first place? Why does playing a video on a computer make it work so much harder than reading emails on it? Come to think of it, how does your computer know how to run programs at all, and an infinite number to boot? In this class, we'll look at computers function, starting from the level of transistors and logic gates, and understanding how those basic building blocks are used to work up to actual "high-level" programs that we use on a day-to-day basis. We'll also look briefly at what sorts of things can make a computer not work.

Ever wondered how your computer turns cat videos on YouTube into something that goes on your screen? Or how it can be sent from your phone over to the Internet in the first place? Why is your computer faster at doing your physics homework than ripping a DVD? How a program can do anything at all? I'll explain how computers function, starting from the level of logic gates, and trying to build those up to actual "high-level" programs that we use on a day-to-day basis.

Your computer can break in many ways. For example, it can simply crash on you "by accident", because you did something it didn't expect but should have. We'll talk about how these mistakes can happen. Your computer can also break because someone else is trying to mess with it. How do people trick your computer to do things you didn't want it to do? How bad can these attacks get? We'll talk about both how people can try to break your computer, and how you can protect yourself from these incidents.