Welcome to Computational Thinking with JavaScript 1, draw and animate. You could be taking this course as a standalone course. It assumes no prior knowledge at all. But it is also the first course in the sequence of four Coursera courses making up the computational thinking with JavaScript specialization. This course helps you to develop some key foundations for working with computers and learning how to think computationally. We use JavaScript across the four courses and in this course, drawing and animation as vehicles to help you learn these deeper skills. Once you've taken this course and even more so if you take the other three, then you will have developed a set of skills and ways of thinking that will improve your ability to work with any computer system, whether it involves a programming language like JavaScript or a database, or some web technology. Furthermore, it will help you to use other complex applications that you may need the work because you'll better understand the underlying principles of how they operate. To give you a hint of the foundations we're talking about, well, let's consider computational thinking for a moment. What is it? In short, it's all about problem-solving in the real-world. Problem-solving is not a generic skill although folk often think it is. Just because you're good at solving problems in one area of life, doesn't mean necessarily you'll be great at it in another area. Why is this? Well, first, you need to know about what we call the application area that contains the problems and tasks that you're interested in. I wrote a little web app recently to help my son read and understand the musical notation. To do that, first, I needed to deeply understand how musical notation that's sheet music works. I needed to understand the application area of sheet music and what it means. Our application area in this course is drawing and animation. The second reason why problem-solving is not generic is because you need to know about what we call the building blocks. That is, you need to know about whatever set of tools you are going to use to build your solutions. If I want to be creative in the application area of household furniture, and I decide I'm going to make wooden furniture, then I'm going to need to know about wood and wooden joint and techniques for cutting, shaping, smoothing, and all of these things. These would be my building blocks. In this course, the building blocks you're going to use are some of the general features of the JavaScript programming language and also some commands specifically suited to drawing and animation. Finally, third, you need to know about what we call creative construction. That is, when you are faced with a new task or problem in an application area you know about and you decide to use some building blocks you also know about, you also need to know about suitable approaches and techniques for analyzing the task, breaking it into manageable chunks, going ahead and working on the chunks, and then putting it all together. They're three pieces. We call this our ABC framework, application area, building blocks, and creative construction. Why have we focused on this? Well, in computing courses, we often dive in too early to full on problem-solving. That's the creative construction bit. But that's a mistake because we cannot be good problem-solvers unless we've learned about our application area and our building blocks thoroughly first. In such courses, your hand is held and maybe with a lot of guidance you managed to create a solution to a problem or task set by the teacher, but you probably won't be able to create a solution to your problem or task. That is what we want for you to be able to use computers really creatively in your own life. What does all that mean? For our first course, we're going to take time to show you all three parts of the ABC, working carefully to make sure you have at least some elements of A and B sufficient so that you can go on to do some C. Some creation of cool drawings and animations that you can then share with your friends via the web. Remember at school when you could take home the things you created in craft classes and show your parents. Well, it's just like that here. We want you to create something cool of your own, and be able to share it with the world. As you can tell, I could talk about this stuff forever. But let's stop there and let you get on with the adventure.
