The Practical
The practical will be a timed exercise in creating an MP3 file using Audacity. It will be given in lab and will be similar to the two Audacity labs.
If you did well on the Audacity homework, you should do well on the Practical.
The Ordinary
I have changed my mind about the format of the ordinary exam. Since we can’t do it in the lab, a short-answer format will work better than a multiple-choice format. The exam will be closed-book and closed-notes.
Here are some suggested items to study for the ordinary exam.
Computational thinking and programming
- Properties and techniques of computational thinking
- Elements (control structures) of programming
- How to make the bird catch the pig
Databases
- Differences between databases and spreadsheets
- How do databases “power” business
- Features of a personal database management system
- Query-by-example to select database information
Digital encoding
- The purpose of an encoding scheme.
- The properties of a good encoding scheme.
- Compute the number of possible encodings given a bit-string length.
- Compute the number of bits required to encode a given number of objects.
- Convert a given number of bits into the equivalent number of bytes.
- Convert a given number of bytes into the equivalent number of bits.
Audio encoding
- Standard sample rate and bit-depth for a CD.
- Nyquist sampling theorem.
- Range of humanly audible frequencies in Hz.
- Compute the file size of a digital recording given the length of the recording in seconds, the sample rate, and the bit-depth.
- Relation between the structure of our ears and the design of audio compression schemes.