BSc (Hons) Computer Science and Management

In this module, subtitled ‘Everything is a Text’, you will consider the value of different types of texts and ways of imparting knowledge and ideas. You will reflect upon your identities as learners and future professionals in the world, considering a range of contexts: the academic/educational context, personal settings and the eco-systems that you live and work in. These reflections will be used to inform your practices as academic learners.

You will explore academic literacies, different ways of knowing and consider what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge. You will engage with critical thinking, making arguments and establishing criteria to defend intellectual positions and these skills will be acknowledged as social practices that produce and reinforce meaning and frameworks of understanding and knowledge.

Furthermore, you will engage with a wide range of academic and non-academic material, individuals and environments in order to contribute to discussions regarding attitudes and assumptions about ideas and experience, including within labour markets, cultural hegemonies, distributions of power and the relationship between the individual and society. In this way, the social interactions, relationships and contexts that underpin academic literacies in higher education will be made explicit.

You will discuss these ideas with students and tutors from the different subjects at Goldsmiths, and learn to be part of the wider university community. You will also be able to submit an assignment which could be a written, graphically designed, audio, video, or negotiated project. You will get to choose the assessment that best shows what you can do.

This module, subtitled ‘Researching Our World & Lives’, builds on the conceptual and contextual foundations of Identity, Agency and Environment 1.

You will learn how to conduct academic research and will be offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen your understanding of the relationship between your own interests, skills, values, career and non-career aspirations, the concepts, theories and contexts of your discipline, and the world.

You will reflect upon your identities as researchers, and learn how the research skills you’ve acquired both within your studies and the world more generally can be related to problem-solving in a wide range of contexts. You will consider your agency as researchers, what you can and cannot research, the ethical issues involved, and think reflexively about your position as a researcher in a range of environments and eco-systems.

Formal conventions of academic research and writing will be integrated into your individualised contexts and goals, enabling the expression of ideas and perspectives that may challenge the status quo. The module will encourage creativity, activism, decision-making and the formation of judgements leading to action-planning in relation to research topics and types of evidence, and professional planning.

You will learn to critique your own subject disciplines. Interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge will ensure that assessment and learning practices provide you with the opportunity to develop new lines of thinking and knowing, within formative collaborative learning and research communities.

This module will introduce you to the fundamentals of programming and object orientation, including the following basic ideas of programming:

• variables
• memory and assignment statements
• control through conditional statements, loops
• functions and procedures
• objects and classes
• instance variables and methods
• arrays
• user interaction
• interaction between objects. 

This module gives a broad introduction to the creation of digital media and rich media websites and applications. It covers both the technical issues of programming with media, and the contextual topics of project management and designing applications to a particular commercial (or other) brief.

This module will introduce you to key theories, insights and methods within Organisational Studies. In particular, it will critically examine different organisational forms, processes and contexts.

The module places an important emphasis on the meaning and content of organisational strategies. It will help you develop the tools you need to analyse an organisation’s positioning within the marketplace, and think/plan strategically in order to make it more competitive.

You'll gain an understanding of strategic management and appreciate the interrelated dynamics of both strategic and organisational research and practice.

This module is aimed at novice programmers who have learnt some basic programming techniques. The course builds on this knowledge by developing your ability to combine short segments of code to create larger projects. 

You'll begin by developing their knowledge of object-oriented programming through learning about principles such as encapsulation and abstraction. You'll be presented with existing code and designs which you'll explore, complete and debug. You'll build upon an example application in the development of a final project.

You'll be expected to engage in both the technical and social implications of your work, considering the applications applicability to a human context. This may include the ethical and cultural impact of software. 

During this work, you'll apply taught techniques in organising, planning and evaluating your code.  

This module aims at providing a good understanding of core marketing management principles applied in consumers, industrial services and organisation both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. It seeks to explain the value of a marketing focus to both customer and supplier, and analyses what marketing can do and does contribute to both individual and organisational users.

This module will cover all the topics needed for marketing management and planning. The module will start analysing strategic tools for marketing strategy definition such as segmentation, targeting and positioning. It will then analyse the marketing process through a review of the marketing mix principles i.e. the 4Ps (Product, Place, Promotion, and Price). It will then explore in detail each one of these tactics. Specifically, students will learn about the strategic role of the product within marketing strategy looking at product management practices and the product innovation process. Students will then analyse the elements of the augmented product model with a focus on the role of branding within marketing management and they will be exposed on how to build brand equity within the company. Finally, students will look into differences between the definition of product and services, and they will be introduced to service marketing practices.

The module will then move to analyse other tactics of the marketing mix. Specifically, students will look into pricing strategies as tools for maximising the profitability of the company and as a promotional tool for reaching consumers. The module will then focus on the Promotion tactics. Students will analyse the topic of Integrated Marketing Communications in order to understand how the different promotional practices used by the company do not happen in isolation, but they are the result of an integrated strategies in order to reach the objectives of the company. The module will then investigate the elements of Integrated Marketing Communication (or Marketing Communication Mix) with a particular focus on advertising, digital advertising and PR (from a management perspective). Furthermore, the module will look at the relationship between sales promotion and sales management, with a particular focus on how Integrated Marketing Communications influence the sales of the company.

Finally, the module will investigate the Place tactics looking into distribution strategies. This section will explore both on B2B and B2C distribution tactics. However, the focus will be mostly on retailing practices within the company. The theories presented so far will be complemented with real life examples and exercises. Students will also be exposed to case studies analysis to apply the theory into practice.

This module covers the core concepts of both finance and accounting. It will introduce students to the important financial and managerial accounting principles that are necessary when running any type of organisation- whether it is manufacturing, merchandising, service, non-profit, or government. It will give students an understanding of how management accounting information is used by managers in their planning and control activities and, is designed to prepare graduates for a variety of professional managerial roles in both the public and private sectors. It covers topics such as financial accounting and reporting, foundation and tools for management accounting, strategy development and using costs in decision making, costing systems and activity-based costing, managing customers, processes and life cycle costs, and using budgets for planning, coordination and control. In the financial component of the module, students will look at the three traditional accounting statements, balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. The module has two distinct elements: managerial finance with a focus on understanding financial statements, and management accounting with an emphasis on costing, budget and control. The lectures in the module will be supplemented by several assignments designed to develop and enhance practical skills.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

This module focuses on the technology underpinning client-server applications. This includes relational database systems, mainly from a development perspective, offering an introduction to data modelling and database implementation in SQL and alternatives such as No SQL The focus is on applications of relational and non-relational databases and techniques relevant to the creation of dynamic web applications such as form handling and templating. It includes practical work related to programming client-server web applications with a focus on principles and up to date practices.

This module extends on the knowledge developed in the module How Computers Work to introduce theoretical underpinning for further study in computer science. By taking this module, you will gain a broad understanding of many of the key topic areas in computer science and the fundamental concepts that underpin them. In the area of fundamental concepts, you will study binary representations and logic, complexity theory and theories of computation, finite state machines and Turing machines. These will be presented in the light of practical examples to illustrate how they are implemented in modern computer systems.

This module will introduce you to the psychological theories and research on how organisational, team-level and individual characteristics affect productivity and mental health. This module will also consider the limitations of our understanding of these issues and how occupational psychology theory and research is trying to overcome them. 

This module is organised around the idea development process, particularly as it relates to generating business ideas, recognising and evaluating business opportunities, and relationships between these concepts. Students will reflect critically on the different definitions, theories and empirical work on business ideas and opportunities, where they come from (e.g., sources of change, trends) and how they are shaped. They will learn how to generate and identify their own business ideas and opportunities using different approaches (e.g., problem or human-centered). Students will also learn how to evaluate these ideas/opportunities, applying both business-focused and person-focused criteria. Using business focused criteria, they will be required to carry out an in-depth feasibility analysis which necessitates research across several areas that are central to the business idea – e.g., the product/service, industry-target market (customer needs), the organization/management and finance. Person-focused criteria will take in to consideration the experience of the student/entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial mindset, background factors and other characteristics.

This module will give students the opportunity to experience group work, in the context of projects to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a computer based system. This module will take students through the entire process, from requirements gathering, user-centred design, proposal development, implementation and evaluation. Students will also assess their outputs from the perspective of multiple roles within an organization, and consider the potential impact of their system on customers, users and society at large.

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

This module aims to advance your software development skills so that you can write more robust and complicated programs. You’ll learn how to use a range of programming techniques that will allow you to deal with unwanted or unexpected events that might happen when your application is running.

You’ll use defensive coding to check data before processing it, and exception handling to gracefully manage unforeseen or unwanted occurrences. You’ll learn how to discuss program structure concerning cohesion (how to meaningfully organise code into modules) and coupling (how to define the interactions between different parts of the program). You’ll learn about test-driven development, where you write tests for your code, and write the code itself, in parallel. You will also learn how to use software versioning tools to manage a software project as it develops.

Final Project in Business Computing is an opportunity for you to apply the skills, knowledge and expertise that you have acquired whilst studying Business Computing to a single and coherent body of work. It will allow you to follow an initiative that appeals to you; the outcome will be the most substantial software that you have had to develop as part of your studies. Implemented systems may comprise a software application or a combination of hardware and software development. The project outcomes will serve as a showcase for your talents and could launch a professional career in industry.

You'll have to manage your own time and set regular objectives, undertaking project analysis, design, implementation and evaluation.

This module will introduce you to the arguments that address the social and environmental context of management and its responsibilities to the organisation’s stakeholders.

Through examination of misdemeanour and irresponsibility, the module will focus on the key structural and individual drivers of social responsibility and sustainability and its manifestations. Addressing the instrumental and moral debates, it will employ both normative and descriptive perspectives, that are applied across workplaces in the public, private and third sectors.

Teaching and learning comprise a balance of theory and practice: we explore the purpose of business, applying ethical frameworks and stakeholder theory, plus, we examine the role of discretion and values. The module will expose you to regulatory/legal issues, the role of board directors and contemporary debates concerning sustainability.    

Your confidence will be developed using formative weekly discussions and learning from guest speakers. This will help you work towards the summative assessment.

This module aims to inspire and develop key skills related to your creative social and environmental entrepreneurship, or intrapreneurship, thereby enhancing your career prospects and employability.