Winter Semester 2026/2027

Summary

This class is a first introduction to Computer Science.

Supplementary Reading

Grading

  • Weekly exercise assignments are not to be turned in and graded in this class. However, you are strongly encouraged to work on them before they are discussed in the exercise session on Wednesday
  • The grade for this class is determined by one final exam
  • There will be a “mock exam” 3-4 weeks before the final exam. Passing the mock exam will add a grade bonus of 1/3 of a grade step to your final grade. Note that the pass/fail decision is not affected by the bonus, and the top grade can be achieved without the bonus.

Topics

Oct 14, 2026

Introduction, Boolean algebra (see notes, Wikipedia article on Boolean algebra)

Oct 20, 2026

Binary logic and logic gates (see notes); example for circuit simplification; flip-flops and latches (see animation of RS latch)

Oct 21, 2026

No class

Oct 27, 2026

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 1 - solutions; Integer representations, two’s complement, positional number systems (see notes)

Oct 28, 2026

Positional number systems (ctd.), floating point arithmetic (begin)

Nov 3, 2026

Floating point arithmetic (notes, see the floating-point converter for a nice illustration of the bit format; more background can be found in the Wikipedia article on floating point arithmetic and, far more advanced, the paper by Goldberg titled What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic)

Nov 4, 2026

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 2 - solutions; Discussion of Exercise Sheet 3 - solutions

Nov 10, 2026

Character strings; from ASCII to Unicode (for background reading, see Wikipedia article on Unicode, discussion of C vs. Pascal strings on Stack Overflow), short video on UTF-8

Nov 11, 2026

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 4 - solutions; Finite state machines (begin, see notes, slides from Uni Tübingen, introductory video)