If you haven’t heard of it before, CS50 (Introduction to Computer Science) on edX is a very popular course that introduces you to the fundamentals of computer science.
I first heard about this course during my undergraduate days back in 2013 when I was trying to pick up Python as a skill, but I never got around to taking it. Over the years, I’ve been reminded repeatedly that ‘code is the future’ and I should embrace as much of it as possible, but that thought never quite manifested into anything tangible. Then came Covid, and oh boy, I’m sure that’s sure to have upended a good run for quite a number of us, and many then saw an accelerated need to pick up new skills and diversify existing ones.
However, I’m a lazy bum so I did nothing, still. Sloth is life.
Then by sheer happenstance, I found it again this week and when I finally subscribed, the initial trepidation of formal learning disappeared when I started getting into the great content but up by the CS50 team.
Cat jokes aside, I hunkered down for Week 0 of the course to complete the first lecture where Dr. David Malan introduces the concept of how all information in a computer is just made up of 1s and 0s, how algorithms interact with inputs to give desired outputs and the Scratch environment where we will begin our programming journey using ‘pseudo-code’.
First impressions after the first lecture? Wow. The production quality of the lecture videos was fantastic. When I say fantastic, it’s like 4K-video-quality, Apple-iPhone-event fantastic. My iPad can’t even display 4K! See it for yourself!
Even without the video quality, the teaching by Dr. Malan was really engaging, and he received my attention throughout the hour-long lecture. Perhaps it’s because I’m only the first lecture, but I found it easy to follow and understand the concepts presented.
The Scratch environment that we’re supposed to work in for the first problem set was also an easy and fun way to get you hooked onto programming by dragging and dropping puzzle-like code to get a sprite to do the desired action.
I am glad to say I have successfully completed the first week of CS50 (it was a cakewalk for the first week, really. I mean, just see what someone did to Thanos up there.), but I am fairly sure I will get royally rekted in the following weeks to come as this is Harvard, after all.
