Computer Science is a discipline concerned with all things related to computers. This includes software, networks, multimedia, computer games, entertainment, hardware, user interfaces, graphics, embedded systems, search engines; the list goes on.

Since the discipline is so broad—there are so many uses of computers—computer scientists consider the following areas the core of the discipline (the idea is that once you know the core, you can develop a computer system in any application):

Software and Programming Languages:
This area is concerned with how to program a computer, how to build and maintain big programs, and how to develop languages that make it easy to do these things.

Hardware: How to build computing hardware, including networks and various devices. Many schools, including Grove City College, consider hardware design as part of computer engineering because of the need for a strong electrical engineering background in this area.

Theory of Computation: Determining the kinds of questions for which we can compute a solution. Not all questions can be answered by a computer program (or, at least, that’s what we believe to be true!).

Algorithms: Finding the best way to solve a computing problem. Generally speaking, algorithms are the “bag of tricks” that computer scientists use to write efficient programs.

Applications: this broad area covers things like Artificial Intelligence and User Interfaces, which are disciplines in and of themselves (building on and further developing software, theory and algorithms), to areas like computer games and graphics.

The Computer Science major gives students a solid foundation in the core areas, along with the opportunity to take courses in many exciting application areas.

The following videos were developed by students as minute-long demonstrations of their recent projects.