Hello world!
I’m Carrie Anne Philbin and welcome to Crash Course Computer Science!
So, computers really have allowed us to do some pretty amazing things - think global
telecommunications, international commerce, global transportation, breakthroughs in medicine,
distributed education, online shopping, online dating, just the Internet in general.
Computers are allowing us to explore our own world and other worlds, and of course some
seemingly mundane things like permitting us to spy on our pets from work or communicate
with our friends in a nearly indecipherable stream of emoji!
But don’t call computers magical.
They are not, I repeat ARE NOT, magical.
So before we get into what we are going to talk about in this course, it might be useful
to tell you what we aren’t going to talk about.
We aren’t going to teach you how to program.
Programming is a really crucial aspect of computer software, and we will get to the
rules that guide the logic of hardware and software design.
But we aren’t going to teach you how to program an Arduino Uno to water your plant
or how to change the CSS on your grandma’s sewing blog so visitors’ cursors turn into
kittens.
This also isn’t a computing course.
Or at least how computing is thought of in the U.S. Computing here is a goal - it’s
what computers do.
And we’ll talk about some of that for sure, but OUR goal for this course is much broader.
But computing means other things in other countries.
It’s all pretty confusing.
But what we are going to look are the history of computers… even before we had electricity.
We’re going retrace the design decisions that have given us our president-day components.
We’re going to talk about how Operating Systems work… or don’t work… how the
YouTubes get to you over the Internet, how our smartphones and other smart devices are...
well getting smarter, and of course mysterious futuristic stuff like quantum computing and
frustrating present-day stuff like hacking!
It’s a lot to cover, but I suppose before we get started I should introduce myself.
I’m Carrie Anne Philbin!
Hello!
I'm an award winning secondary Computing teacher, author of 'Adventures in Raspberry Pi' and
the creator of a YouTube video series for teenagers called the Geek Gurl Diaries, which
includes stuff like interviews with women working in technology, computer science based
tutorials, and hands on digital maker style projects.
In my day job, I help people learn about technology and how to make things with computers as Director
of Education for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is a charity based in Cambridge in the
UK.
Needless to say, I am passionate about this stuff, but not because computers are these
amazing devices that are always making our lives easier (sometimes that’s debatable)
but because computers inarguably have become pivotal in our society.
From our cars and thermostats to pacemakers and cellphones, computers are everywhere,
and it’s my hope that by the end of this course you’ll have a better understanding
and appreciation for how far we’ve come and how far they may take us.
I’ll see you next week.