We live in a physical world and a digital world.
No matter when you were born, the world you live in is different from your parents
world, and different from the world you lived in just a few years ago.
Our world is increasingly connected with people, places and
things and is full of opportunities that change every day.
Our digital world is full of new ways of thinking, new ways of communicating, and
new ways of working, new ways of helping each other too.
This digital world is powered by you, but
also by computers, by computer science, and by computational thinking.
Topics you'll learn about in this course.
You'll learn about programming.
The first steps in making the computer do what you tell it to do.
You'll learn about the Web and the Internet, and
how programming works with them to create a new world.
You'll learn to create things digitally, and
to share them with the world you live in.
Learning about the world we live in, means learning about our physical world and
our digital world.
The physical world is made of atoms.
You may have learned about the building blocks of matter of physical
things in school.
When you read a paperback book and give it to a friend to share,
you don't have the book anymore, although you have the memory of reading it.
The digital world is made of bits, the zeroes and
ones are the building blocks of software of streaming videos and e-book.
Creating new copies of e-book with bits rather than atoms,
doesn't require new matter.
It simply requires duplicating the zeroes and
ones from which the e-book is constructed.
Looking at the world as being made of both bits and
atoms can change how you view opportunity and potential.
In this course, we'll help you learn about creating opportunities
by teaching you to create programs and
other digital things that can empower you to affect the digital world you live in.
These digital changes can affect the physical world as well.
Your world, my world and our world is powered by software.
Here's an example.
Learners all over the world want to learn a new language.
English speakers want to learn Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, Chinese and more.
More than 60 million people have learned and
are learning new languages using the duoLingo website.
In using this site, you not only learn a new language.
But in the process of learning that language,
you help translate webpages from one language to another.
That service helps keep duoLingo free.
You don't pay to use it.
The folks at duoLingo are creating new courses for new learners all the time.
Using software and the power of the web and the internet to empower people and
help change the world.
The Web is one way the digital world differs from the physical world.
What are the websites you visit?
Alexa.org tracks the most visited websites in the world.
Although the top website visited is Google,
that doesn't mean you visit Google every day.
You may use Facebook, although that depends on many factors
since Facebook is not accessible everywhere.
You may watch videos on YouTube as well.
If you live on China, you're likely to use the Baidu search engine
which makes it a very visited web site.
Yahoo and Amazon are also highly visited sites.
Wikipedia has changed how we answer questions and learn.
Though depending on what you're interested in and
where you live, you may have used QQ more often than Wikipedia.
And if you're used to communicating in a 140 characters or
fewer, you've used Twitter.
While if you live in India, you've likely visited Google.in.
If you live in another country, you likely visit different websites.
But the websites you visit don't necessarily tell us who you are,
or what you're interested in, or even how you communicate.
But they may tell us where you live.
Sometimes the websites you visit tell us about the language you speak, and
even the country you live in.
Though if we only see the name of the website,
it may be hard to tell that you live in Brazil.
You may see some similarities as well,
as some differences in the top sites by country.
These sites don't tell us who you are as an individual.
But we can learn something about your country and
maybe even how you shop online.
Today, we communicate very differently than we did a few years ago, and
drastically different than we did even as recently as ten years ago.
How we communicate and how you do depend on many things including where you live,
if you have a mobile device and even what kind of mobile device you have.
These communication apps are all written in software.
They help us as we live in both the physical world and
the digital world and as we navigate our way through the world.
Even as we communicate and keep things hidden and communicate at the same time.
Of course, computing and software are about much more than communicating.
We can also help each other through software.
Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for
helping develop microloans and the field of microfinance.
Today, websites like kiva.org help individuals as well as banks loan
money to those who have a plan for a business or for other enterprises.
Each person learning about programming in a digital world is different.
You don't visit the same websites as your neighbor, just as you don't necessarily
read the same books, listen to the same music or play the same sports.
In this course, you'll learn about how to create webpages and
programs that you can share with us, with each other and the world.
You'll learn something about how the power of software and computing can be shared