This project adapts a Georgia Tech course, "Introduction to Media Computing," to create two very different introductory computer science courses at University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) to make these courses engaging, exciting and attractive to a large number and variety of students. One course, intended for students not majoring in computer science, will be a general fluency course, whose goals are to satisfy general student interests in computing and to help produce more informed citizens with respect to information technology. The other course will be a gentle introduction to computer science generally and programming in particular for the roughly 50-70% of incoming computer science majors who have very little background in computer programming, giving those equally qualified but less experienced students a course better suited to engage and excite them. This will level the playing field in the traditional CS 1 course and improve the retention rate of these less experienced computer science majors
