Citizens, the intended beneficiaries of public policy making, are consuming, adopting and contributing to technology at unprecedented levels. This trend will continue to grow as technology becomes more accessible to more and more people. Thus, it is increasingly necessary for Public Policy officials to understand these developments brought forth by technology and associated citizens' expectations.
Technology is fast becoming the common platform of convergence for important sectors of the economy. Areas such as Finance (FinTech), Energy (GasTech) and Urban Planning (SmartNation) are being powered through the creation of apps that promise to make our lives better, safer and more rewarding. Programming is the fundamental tool required to understand what these apps do and to communicate with the broader eco-system in which public policy officials will operate in the future. Programming is the language of the future!
Moreover, programming trains the mind to think in a logical, structured manner. It teaches key concepts like breaking a complex problem down into smaller and more manageable components, the idea of conditional decision making, and recursive thinking - all of which are valuable tools for today's policy maker, especially during the policy analysis and policy implementation stages when public policy officials must deal with multiple, often competing priorities.
Conducted by NUS Computer Science, this course introduces the fundamental concepts of problem solving by computing and programming using Python. Topics to be covered include problem solving by computing, writing pseudo-codes, problem formulation and problem solving, program development, coding, testing and debugging, fundamental programming constructs, and fundamental data structures.
We have curated this programme in response to alumni demand to stay current in public policy thinking and skills. As this is the first time we are running this programme, i.e., prototyping, we are offering it on a complimentary basis.