The Beauty and Joy of Computing

This recorded short course is a compilation of 24 hours Computer Science 10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing (Spring 2015, University of California, Berkeley) Instructor: Professor Dan Garcia.

Are you a student going into a computer science diploma or course and want to know how it feels to take the course. Then this free course is for you.

This course provide an introduction to the beauty and joy of computing, dealing with the history, social implications, great principles, and future of computing. We’ll focus on some of the “Big Ideas” of computing, such as abstraction, design, recursion, concurrency, simulations, and the limits of computation. Tis an exciting new course offered by the UC Berkeley EECS Department. Computing has changed the world in profound ways. It has opened up wonderful new ways for people to connect, design, research, play, create, and express themselves. However, just using a computer is only a small part of the picture. The real transformative and empowering experience comes when one learns how to program the computer, to translate ideas into code. This course will teach students how to do exactly that, using Snap! (based on Scratch), one of the friendliest programming languages ever invented. It’s purely graphical, which means programming involves simply dragging blocks around, and building bigger blocks out of smaller blocks.