Hi, I was looking at the computer science courses available to first year students and there were a few (1FC3, 1MA3, 1MD3, 1TA3) I was wondering what would be a good computer course for someone who has taken grade 12 computer science in high school. It would be nice if the course was easy, but also introduced some new topics not covered in high school course.
Thanks =]

I have not taken any of these courses but I think I can give you a better idea of what they're about. I can't suggest any one of them with any kind of authority since I don't know what is now covered in Grade 12 Comp Sci.

1FC3 - this is basically a math course. I doubt you will be doing much programming, and if you do it will be most likely in Maple, Matlab or another piece of "computational software." In short, you'll learn more math, but hardly any programming concepts apart from those that apply to specific software (Matlab has its own programming language which isn't very different from C from what I remember).

1MA3 - I think this course will basically teach you how to take information from word problems and put it through a piece of software so that you get the right answer. Again, I don't think there will be many "programming" concepts (i.e. stacks, queues, etc.) being presented in this course. It will be mostly "Here's the problem, here's how to put it through this program to get the right answer."

1MD3 - This is really the only course I see on the list that actually touches on programming though not very much. It seems to be a "This is the process you should go through while programming" course which will teach you...well as the description says "disciplined programming; programming environments; debugging; imperative programming constructs; values and types; libraries; file input-output. Computer Science concepts are illustrated."

1TA3 - has about as much to do with computer science as a hot dog has in common with a dog. Namely part of its name (HA). This is a course in word processing, using email (so tough), making presentations and websites, etc. While useful to be sure, this is not what I would call a Computer Science course. They just threw it under the umbrella because it makes use of computers.

So there you have it. Again I haven't taken these courses, I'm just going by the description in the calendar. If I had to suggest any of them it would be 1MD3, at least there you're learning something related to programming and concepts.
But I don't know how much you already know.

How much have you gotten into programming in highschool (i.e. what languages have you used, what were the major assignments about, etc.)?

Thanks a lot DannyV =]
I think i'll go into 1MD3
So far, I've programmed in java, and a little in visual basic.

Java is a really good language to know at Mac... since Java is now the standard for McMaster web apps

I heard from a friend that in comp sci you learn C (not C++) because they want you to learn syntax and doing things from scratch.

Thanks a lot Chad. That sounds good cause as far as i know, the syntax between java and C is similar =]

I had a really, really horrible experience with 1MA3 - they dropped the lab section, so they were trying to teach us theory straight from lecture. They pretty much asked people with no programming experience to to write algorithms. When I took it first semester last year, over half the class failed the first midterm because the course was not being taught properly.

It could be better later though, who knows

Yes I took 1MD3, we worked on C. It can be tricky, if you never coded before, like me.

I took 1TA3 last year, its not exactly like the course description says. You learn some computer basics like MS Word, some advanced Excel stuff (which I found tricky), MS Access and HTML.