CS50 - Week 0: Pseudocode and Scratch - Daniel Hirschberg

Yesterday, I watched the two Week 0 lectures. I thought the professor was excellent, and definitely high energy. Having both muppets and a Ferris Bueller's Day Off spoof got me hooked from the start.

While poking around a bit, I found some helpful resources. In particular, the CS50.tv site. On that page, you can find not only links to the videos of the lectures, but audio versions, transcripts, and notes (including the slides shown during lecture), which might be of value for anyone with limited bandwidth for 2, 50 minute, high quality videos a week.

In week 0 we also took the pre-class survey, which seems important. Both the survey and the professor made it clear that the class is for students of all experience and ability. 73% of the class has NO prior CS experience. I studied computer science theory in college, but have extremely limited programming experience. The demos presented this week of projects other students were able to produce after this course blew me away (especially wrdly! But I might just be a sucker for a well produced video...). Not only that, but seeing how powerful even the "toy" programming language of Scratch was similarly excited me.

In this week's lectures we got an overview of the course, a very brief introduction to the way computers and code work, and introduced to the language Scratch, which allows click and drag programming with a puzzle piece type interface so that it's intuitive which pieces of code "fit" in each place.

My goals for this class are:

To watch all the lectures.
To do some of the homework.
To have a better understanding of programmers and programming.
To get closer to my goal of being able to build a small web application.

I see back in the first thread about this class that several people have posted links to their first homework assignment. That's awesome!

What did you guys think of the first week of lectures? What are your backgrounds, and expectations for the class?

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    # I indented these lines
    # 4 spaces, and now they show
    # up as a code block.

    print "hello world"

# I indented these lines
# 4 spaces, and now they show
# up as a code block.

print "hello world"

Math

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Remember to wrap math in $ ... $ or \[ ... \] to ensure proper formatting.

2 \times 3

2 \times 3

2^{34}

2^{34}

a_{i-1}

a_{i-1}

\frac{2}{3}

\frac{2}{3}

\sqrt{2}

\sqrt{2}

\sum_{i=1}^3

\sum_{i=1}^3

\sin \theta

\sin \theta

\boxed{123}

\boxed{123}

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`italics` or `_italics_`	italics
`bold` or `__bold__`	bold
- bulleted - list	bulleted list
1. numbered 2. list	numbered list
Note: you must add a full line of space before and after lists for them to show up correctly
paragraph 1 paragraph 2	paragraph 1 paragraph 2
`[example link](https://brilliant.org)`	example link
`> This is a quote`	This is a quote
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Math	Appears as
Remember to wrap math in `$` ... `$` or `\[` ... `\]` to ensure proper formatting.
`2 \times 3`	$2 \times 3$
`2^{34}`	$2^{34}$
`a_{i-1}`	$a_{i-1}$
`\frac{2}{3}`	$\frac{2}{3}$
`\sqrt{2}`	$\sqrt{2}$
`\sum_{i=1}^3`	$\sum_{i=1}^3$
`\sin \theta`	$\sin \theta$
`\boxed{123}`	$\boxed{123}$

Comments

The first-week-lectures were awesome! The professor is amazing!

I know absolutely nothing about computer science apart from being able to code a few lines in Python and knowing some basic HTML syntax. But I'm really liking the classes and I think they're very helpful for anyone with little or no prior experience in CS.

What are my expectations?

Well, I expect myself to take everything the course has to offer and I expect the classes to stay as engaging and awesome as they are.

I'll [hopefully] watch all of the lectures and do all of the homework.

I adding the link to my week 0 project. I had fun working on it. And it'd be nice to see what other people on Brilliant did for Pset 1. So, do post your Scratch project here.

Mursalin Habib - 7 years, 5 months ago

Nice thinking in your project! I am inspired.

Lokesh Sharma - 7 years, 4 months ago

Math	Appears as
Remember to wrap math in `\(` ... `\)` or `\[` ... `\]` to ensure proper formatting.
`2 \times 3`	$2 \times 3$
`2^{34}`	$2^{34}$
`a_{i-1}`	$a_{i-1}$
`\frac{2}{3}`	$\frac{2}{3}$
`\sqrt{2}`	$\sqrt{2}$
`\sum_{i=1}^3`	$\sum_{i=1}^3$
`\sin \theta`	$\sin \theta$
`\boxed{123}`	$\boxed{123}$