CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing (inst.eecs.berkeley.edu)

49 points by ra66it ↗ HN
CS10 : The Beauty and Joy of Computing [berkeley.edu]

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/

Give them the "big ideas" on one hand, and allow them to "peek under the hood" (do some visual programming with Scratch/BYOB/Snap) on the other. :)

9 comments

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Needs more demoscene. No aspect of computing more succinctly captures the title of this course IMHO.
we do a lot of demos, but why demoscene?
Here's a good explanation: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096

http://scene.org/ is very active with news. http://pouet.net/ is the canonical site for searching demos, you can find most demos here. (Demos really should be run in real-time, but you can find video links if you don't have the hardware or don't want to download the program.)

I'll just highlight one example that shows application to CS research: Numb Res by CNCD and Fairlight, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU and explanation https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

/\ That is exactly why some people would rather die than do CS course.
Sorry, were you replying to me or to ra66it? And what do you mean?
The demoscene is at the intersection of art, music programming, hacking, online groups, tech festivals etc. It has a long history with a tremendous corpora of productions, techniques, culture, publications, etc. It's probably the biggest sub culture that nobody has ever heard of, with thousands of computing enthusiasts getting together in arenas to literally show off their code.

In the demoscene, code is art.

Its participants will literally consume years of their life on a production for nothing but the pleasure of it.

When I saw the title of the course I immediately assumed at least half the semester was going to be on the demoscene since no computing based cultural movement I'm aware of more succinctly speaks to the course title than the demoscene.