Aloha and welcome to ITM 352, Business Systems Programming With Microservices and Web Applications!

You will find ITM 352 both exciting and challenging and very unlike other courses you have taken or will take at Shidler. One primary difference is that programming is a skill that can only be built with practice, patience, and determination. At times this may be very difficult and frustrating. You cannot memorize your way to programming skill, you must develop and cultivate it by pushing yourself to increasingly higher levels of performance and capability. It is more similar to training for a sport than acquiring knowledge and insight (although this is also present). Because of this we take an “athletic” approach where you progress at your own pace and level. You will do most of your study and preparation work at home, leaving class time for personal “training” with the instructor. We hope you find this approach effective and valuable in developing your programming skills.

There are four skill levels of software development:

Each level involves fundamentally different cognitive skill (that is, “ways or thinking”). Acquiring these skill levels are not easy and will require sustained effort and determination. You cannot “study” your way to these skills. They can only be acquired though experience. However the rewards for acquiring these skills are huge! See the Future Benefits section for details. This course is very ambitious and explicitly designed to rapidly get you to the “Application” level of programming skill.

Course goals

• Acquiring basic programming skills in an IT context
• Understanding why MIS people need basic programming skills and knowledge
• Gaining hands-on experience in developing software applications
• Experiencing first-hand MIS problems and solutions
• Experiencing and understanding first-hand project management, working in teams, software engineering issues
• Gaining confidence in addressing MIS problems

Objectives

• Become familiar with basic programming and software development concepts.
• Learn and utilize development environment for implementing their assignments and performing lab exercises (e.g. an IDE). Note: you must demonstrate that you have acquired rudimentary programming skills to be successful in ITM352 (and in the ITM major). Everyone is capable of doing this no matter what your background is!!!
• Acquire skills and strategies for becoming efficient in all phases of planning, designing, programming, documenting, and testing web-based e-service applications.
• Gain hands-on experience with all aspects of introductory level programming.
• Provide a basis (both skills and knowledge) for ITM 353 and ITM 354.

Pedagogy

ITM 352 consists of a sequence of modules, each typically taking a week to complete. Most modules have the following structure:

• One or more learning outcomes, describing the major goals for the module.
• One or more readings and other online resources, providing background material.
• One or more experiential learning activities, providing a structured set of challenges enabling you to acquire mastery of material.
• One or more assessments, measuring your success in achieving the learning outcomes.

This course follows an “inverted” classroom approach where you view lectures and follow along demos at home at you own pace and assignments are done in class. ITM 352 also implements an educational technique called athletic software engineering, which relies heavily on WODs (Workouts of the Day) to help you acquire mastery of the concepts in this course.

Future benefits

The skills you acquire in ITM 352 provide professional competitive advantages:

• You will be able to build sophisticated web applications using advanced HTML, CSS, Javascript, and JAVASCRIPT
• Deeper understanding and confidence in addressing technical issues in MIS
• The ability to address data collection, data conversion, e-commerce problems without reliance on consultants
• You can diagnose or develop or improve business critical end-user computing applications (spreadsheets, databases, reporting tools, etc.)
• You will understand enough of the fundamentals of programming to rapidly and effectively learn additional programming languages and scripting tools such as Java, Python, Perl, R, Matlab, etc.
• Participate in the technical management issues for acquiring and maintaining information systems