DAVID MALAN: CS50 was recently visited by Presley Alexander, an 11-year-old
who's actually been taking CS50 online.
In fact, here is the video that Presley submitted as part of her problem
set zero wherein she says, hello world.
PRESLEY ALEXANDER: Hello world, I'm Presley, a 10-year-old girl
from Denver, Colorado, and I have been using scratch for a couple of years
now for both programming and doing animations,
as well I've been taking a couple other courses on languages
like JavaScript and Python.
But they are really focused on language, and not
generally thinking like a programmer.
And that's why I'm loving CS50 so much, and we're just starting week zero,
but I'm already loving it so much, and I'm really
glad to continue to take the entire course.
I'm really thankful that courses like this are available to kids like me
all around the world and I can take the next step to being
the next generation of women in STEM.
I'm Presley, and this is CS50.
DAVID MALAN: Now, it turns out Presley is homeschooled whereby
she takes classes at home with her parents, and as part of her lessons
she has been filming a short video and putting it online every day
for the past four years.
In fact, one of the video she shot was about CS50 itself.
PRESLEY ALEXANDER: Hey everyone, it's Presley at actoutgames.com, here.
And today I'm going to be talking a little bit about CS50,
or more specifically, CS50x, which is edX's online CS50 course.
So you might have seen yesterday we just posted
this random video which was just me saying, hi to you
all the people in CS50.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about why that just got posted yesterday,
like completely out of context.
Just, hey, am welcome to CS50.
And you guys were really pretty confused.
To start off CS50 is a really, really great intro to computer science course.
And edX, which is basically just this place where you can take courses
online-- like Coursera and places like that--
has been running the CS50 for a while.
And CS50 used to just be like Harvard's intro to computer science class,
and that was on edX for free so we got it, so people like us,
we guys-- so people like us could go and take that course
and learn about computer science.
But what really cool this year is it's actually
Harvard and Yale's intro to a computer science course, which is really, really
cool because now there's two of these really cool schools collaborating
on this intro to computer science course, which I'm really excited about.
And this is one of the reasons why we homeschool,
because we have access to all these amazing resources
with these amazing teachers like David who's teaching CS50,
and we're not stuck with the local teacher
at the local school, which I'm sure most of the local teachers
are pretty amazing, but we can still go and get these really amazing teachers
and take Harvard and Yale's CS50 course at home,
which would be really difficult to do if I wasn't homeschooled.
So it's definitely really great to have access to such amazing teachers
online, and not just being stuck with the local people.
A lot of times when people are going to make an online course they
just take what they're doing in classroom and they record it,
and then they put it online.
And sometimes it works really well, but most of the time it doesn't.
So in CS50x they're doing it really well, they're doing it right.
So they do have the lectures entirely recorded,
and lectures are great, and really interactive, and entertaining,
and they're really, really fun to watch.
So you can watch the lectures and feel like you're in a lecture hall--
and you're watching those lectures-- but they also
have these online videos, so you can both attend the lectures,
but the lectures mentioned things you can do in person
and that you can do online, but they come
with these little extra online videos and all sorts
of little tidbits of things that you can put on that is online.
And they're doing it right, to really bring the course online
instead of just having some of the things in the course that they're
doing in the classroom, and then just putting them online.
They're making it really interactive and great
for the people that are watching it through their computers.
So I actually just finished week zero, most of that
was because the problem set for week zero was to make scratch program,
and some of you know I've been on scratch--
I've been scratching for about two years now.
So I could not just make something simple, like you click on the cat
and it bounces around a little bit and asks you some questions.
I couldn't do that.
So I actually worked really hard, I put about-- if you
took all the I was sitting on the computer it would be five,
six hours over the course of a couple of weeks.
I worked really, really hard on it so I'd really
appreciate it if you guys went and checked it out
because I worked really hard on it.
There'll be link in doobly-doo.
I hope you like it because I worked so hard.
So we're actually just starting week one like I said, and we're
learning a little bit of C, and what I really love is about the way
they're teaching C. They're not just teaching the syntax of C and like,
OK, this command does this, and then moving on to the next command.
They're teaching the concepts and what everything
means, and why of doing this.
So they're teaching the syntax, they're teaching what the syntax means.
And your teaching the concepts, like the loops,
and the Booleans, and all sorts of stuff they're
teaching, that I'm familiar with, but in colored block puzzle piece form.
And I just want to say, scratch is actually--
if you're moving from scratch to C, you're
going to be really surprised at how much C actually looks like scratch.
Scratch basically just it more like a shape
and put some text instead of the language.
They look pretty similar actually.
But it's just so amazing, and it's such a great way
to teach programming, because once you are in the basic concepts
you just have to learn some syntax and you can program in any language,
really.
So you can start programming in pretty much any language
once you learn the concepts behind these, which is just such a great way.
So like I've said many times, we actually just finished week zero,
so we are going to try and go through it as quickly as possible.
We're still going to take our time and put lots of effort
into the problem sets as well, so we're not just
going to do something really quick that can be done in like 10 minutes.
We're going to work and put time into the problem set.
And I just want to say, if you want to get started with CS50,
don't just wait until next year when it starts all the way over again.
Go ahead and join now.
You can do it any time of the year, really.
So please join it if you really are interested in learning computer science
because it's such a great way to teach it.
We'll post more updates as we go through it, and if some of you guys
are also taking it we can help each other with problem sets,
and talk about concepts that we learned, and stuff together,
which will be a really great interactive experience.
There'll be a link to edX and the CS50 course in doobly-doo
so you can sign up and take it if you're interested.
So a huge thank you to edX, and Harvard, and Yale,
and David performing the stuff online and making such a great intro
to computer science course that I am having so much fun with so far.
If you want to keep up with how we're doing on the course
as well as keep up with some other things that we're doing then
please, please subscribe.
It really helps us out.
So yeah, thank you for watching and I'll see you Tomorrow.
Bye.
DAVID MALAN: To see Presley's own YouTube channel head to this URL here.
This was Presley Alexander, and this was CS50.