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.
