Name: CS50 2019 - Lecture 0 at Yale - Computational Thinking, Scratch
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T10:21:17.000Z
Duration: 1 h 11 min 24 s
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This is CS50, Yale University's introduction

to the intellectual enterprises of computer science

All of that and so much more will make great sense before long.

And I thought I'd mention that Benedict and I actually go way back.

He and I were classmates at Harvard some 20-plus years ago.

And we went through our archives, even though this

was well before digital cameras, and found this one.

And I was friendly with some of his roommates as well.

And if you can see here, this is a stack of some very cheap pizza in Cambridge,

It was so amazing that they would give you two pies at once

And if we enhance here, this is our own Professor Brown.

And it's only fortuitous that we've now come full circle and are together now,

So if you are leaning toward computer science,

you might already have some comfort with the idea of being in a class like this.

And in fact, if you're anything like me back in the day,

I had no interest in or really appreciation

of what computer science was back in my first year of college.

And in fact, when I got to college, I really

gravitated toward things I was more familiar with.

At the time, I'd come off the heels of high school.

And I really liked a constitutional law class in high school.

And I liked history and that sort of domain.

And so I just kind of naturally gravitated

when I got to Cambridge toward government,

which was the closest concentration or major there in Cambridge.

And I was still, nonetheless, kind of a geek as a kid.

I certainly played with computers or computer games.

But I never really took a genuine interest in it.

And even my friends, ironically in retrospect,

who did take computer science in high school,

I thought they were actually the geeks and didn't really see

the appeal of heads down at a computer monitor, typing away,

It just didn't really make any sense to me or resonate.

But I finally, sophomore year, I got up the nerve

to shop a course that was and still is now called CS50.

It was being offered only at Harvard at that time.

And even then, I only got up the nerve to go into that lecture hall

because the professor at the time let me sign up pass-fail,

since I really rather feared failure of some sort

because it was just so new and unfamiliar to me.

But long story short, I ended up falling in love with it

once I actually came to realize what it was.

And no joke, on Friday evenings, when back then the homework

assignments or problem sets would be released,

I would legitimately look forward to going back to my dorm room--

7:00 PM, the p set would be released-- and diving

So at the end of the day, computer science really isn't about programming.

It's probably not about what you perceived your own friends as doing

It really is about problem solving more generally.

So if you're feeling at all uncomfortable with the idea of shopping

or taking a class like this, realize that most of the people around you

2/3 of CS50 students each year have no prior CS experience.

So even though on occasion it might sound like it, perhaps

based on answers that others seem to be giving or facial expressions

they might be having, it's really not actually the case.

2/3 of you are feeling as uncomfortable or less comfortable

But the course itself, as you'll see in the syllabus,

There is no course-wide curve per se, but rather

what's going to matter ultimately is not so much

where you end up relative to your classmates at the end of this course,

but where you end up relative to yourself as of today,

and focusing on that delta and that sense of progression yourselves.

And that domain itself doesn't have to be engineering,

Really, I daresay we can generalize problem

There's some kind of input, the problem that you want to solve.

And there's an output, hopefully the solution to that problem.

And then between is this sort of proverbial, a proverbial black box,

this sort of secret sauce that somehow takes that input

And it's not yet apparent to us how it does that.

But that's the goal, ultimately, of computer science

But to get to that point, I claim that we

need to talk a little bit about what computer scientists would

call representation, like how you actually represent

And odds are, even if you really aren't a computer person yourself,

you probably know that computers only speak a certain language of sorts,

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CS50 2019 - Lecture 0 at Yale - Computational Thinking, Scratch

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