Trinity students are required to take one credit of seminar their first year at Duke, which will be fulfilled in this program by taking the half credit course CompSci 18S twice, in the fall and in the spring. The other two DES-CS credits can be used for electives and possibly to fulfill other Curriculum 2000 requirements.
Trinity first-year students must also complete Writing 20 their first year. CompSci 6 requires Math 31 or 31L or equivalent knowledge. This course can be taken before or at the same time as CompSci 6, or can be waived if you have AP credit. That leaves four or five credits of courses of your choice in the first year. You should explore areas of academic interest that you might want to major in.
No. The DES-CS program will allow you to explore computer science, but you do not have to major or minor in computer science. The DES-CS program will teach you useful skills that you can apply to your other courses, creating animations and programming skills. For example, if you majored in biology you might want to create an animation of how two animals interact. If you majored in history, you might want to recreate a scene from the past. As another example, many disciplines have special software that has been created for analyzing data, but it may not be setup specifically for the data you have collected. You would have the skills to write a simple program to reformat the data so it can be used with the existing software, or to write your own program for analyzing the data. It is not uncommon for Duke staff or graduate students to take introductory computer science courses to learn a skill that it would have been helpful for them to take as an undergraduate.
Computer science is an interdisciplinary field. Computers are used to solve problems in almost all disciplines. The Computer Science A.B. degree is flexible to allow students to combine computer science with another discipline. About half of the computer science majors double major with a variety of other disciplines including Economics, Biology, Mathematics, Music, Art and English. A minor in computer science is also available.
YES as of 2009. Both programs are for small groups of students to take multiple courses together. If you take both, then in the fall you will have 4 credits total with FOCUS and DES-CS, and lots of small courses. You would not need to add any more courses, but could add a half credit course. In the spring you would have three courses of your choice, one of which would have to be Writing 20.
Yes, you can apply to both DES-CS and FOCUS and can be admitted to both programs. You must send in separate applications for both programs.
No, Engineering students have specific engineering programming courses that they must take. They cannot receive credit for CompSci 4 or CompSci 6, so the DES-CS program is not an option. Engineering students can start taking computer science courses with either CompSci 100 or CompSci 100E.
No, The focus in the class is not on the artistic side, but on learning computer science concepts and how to write programs. The animations in CompSci 4 are created in the following way. The objects (people, cars, animals, scenery) already exist. You select them and place them where you want them in the world. You do not build the objects. You will add functionality to the objects, teaching people how to walk, run, skip, etc.