Must Watched Movie for My Computer Science / Informatics Student
As a computer science student, spending everyday time learning and coding is an integral part. Apart from studying, entertainment is also important as a medium for refreshing from routine. One of them is by watching movies.
However, what if the watched film is also closely related to the lessons learned every day. Of course, it will provide more benefits. At the same time, it was refreshing while digging deeper into history or true stories related to computers and technology.
I recommend the following films for my students in the computer science/informatics study program that are very relevant to watch.
Pirates of The Sillicon Valley
This film tells the story of the beginning of the founding of Microsoft and Apple by the three main characters at that time, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak. This film also tells of several conflicts and disputes over the theft of ideas that some of the above characters did when they founded their first company.
What to Learn: From this film, try to understand some of the history of the operating system and the world’s giant company in its early days. For example, who was the first to have an operating system based on a graphical user interface and mouse (GUI)? What are the fundamental differences between early Apple computers and Windows?
The Imitation Game
This film is a true story during World War II. A British mathematician who is one of the pioneers in modern computers, Alan Turing, tries to decrypt the message contained in the Enigma machine. Alan Turing has been named the father of cryptography and the father of modern computers.
What to learn:
You can learn about cryptography, plain text, and ciphertext from this film. Besides that, what is also important is learning to understand what a Turing test is, a non-deterministic Turing machine and a deterministic Turing machine.
Related Courses:
Cryptography, Algorithm strategy, basic programming, topics on P vs. Np, Big Oh notation.
The Billion Dollar Code
This mini-series tells the story of a conflict dispute between Google and a German startup regarding the algorithm used on Google Maps. Regardless of whether this dispute is actual or not, this story provides essential lessons regarding patents in technology and copyright protection. The most exciting part is in the last episode when the trial takes place, where many technical discussions are carried out — for example, related to the basis of the zooming algorithm used by Google Maps and its relationship to data structures and computer graphics.
What to learn: You can see how the software industry collaborates, from prototyping to maintaining finished products. An important aspect that you need to look at is how the programmer must also consider the performance and resource load of the program he designed to be used by the user efficiently.
Snowden
This film is a true story about Edward Snowden’s journey as a worker at the National Security Agency. He realized that the United States government was spying on everyone through electronic devices to track and identify threats to the country. Snowden leaked this secret to the public and made him the most wanted fugitive (until today). Snowden currently lives a nomadic life and is still being pursued by the United States government.
The Social Network
This film tells about Mark Zuckerberg’s journey in building Facebook. Not only that, there are many other sides of Mark Zuckerberg that we can observe in this film, including how he conflicts with the person who stole his data and with his co-workers. The film is set in Harvard, where Zuckerberg is currently a computer science student.
