[MUSIC PLAYING Tritonal, Cash Cash,  "Untouchable"]

SPEAKER 1: I'm going to France, and you're going, too.

DAVID MALAN: This is CS50, Harvard University's introduction

to the intellectual enterprises of computer science

and the arts of program-- and for the first time in history,

Indeed, whether you're here in Cambridge or in New Haven or Miami or St. Louis

or Amsterdam or anywhere around the world

taking CS50, computer science E50, CS50X, CS50 AP,

>> So I made a mistake myself some time ago when I started off college.

And I got to college, and I decided to frankly, stick within my comfort zone.

I ended up declaring a concentration, or a major, of government.

Ant that was mostly a function of me being pretty familiar with government

or at least history or I really liked constitutional law in high school.

And so when I got here, I kind of gravitated toward things

I certainly wanted to stay within my comfort zone,

and it wasn't until sophomore year that I finally

got up the nerve to step foot in a classroom called CS50.

And at that point, did I finally realize that, my God, homework could actually

>> Indeed, I was one of those kids that on Friday evenings when

the P-SETS would be released, I would go back to my room and dive

And for me, that was a sign that this was a field for me.

But what was more important was the fact that I did get up this nerve

to explore waters unfamiliar to me and get beyond my own comfort zone

and frankly, I only was able to do that sophomore year by taking this class

>> Indeed, it was the very last day that I finally switched over and finally

declared CS as my concentration, putting gov at that point behind me.

And so we're not setting out in this course to turn all of you

into CS majors or concentrators, but rather to give you an opportunity

to hopefully go beyond the world with which you're currently familiar

and bring back from this world skills and knowledge and savvy

that you can apply to your own world, whether that's

in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, or beyond.

>> Indeed, if you're feeling a little intrepid

about being in this room let alone in this class,

realize that if history is any indication, 72% of you

So it is by all means not the case that the student sitting to the left

or to the right or in front or behind you knows far more about CS

And indeed, much of the support structure

that we've set up in this course over the past many years

has been for exactly that reason-- to provide an on ramp that still exits

just as rigorously and just as high as ever--

but the slope of which allow students less comfortable and more comfortable

alike to succeed irrespective of his or her prior background.

>> Indeed, what ultimately matters in this class is not

so much where you end up relative to your classmates

but where you in week 12 end up relative to yourself

in week zero, which is where we are here today.

>> Indeed and this may very well and probably does look like Greek

But rest assured, that this and so much more

is going to be completely within your grasp in just a little bit of time.

>> But today, we focus on some of the higher level ideas

to give you a taste of CS50 and computer science

in a sense of what you're signing up for.

And indeed, computer science might be distilled more

simply as computational thinking-- thinking like a computer, if you will.

And there's so many different things ingredients that go into that,

If the goal of the class ultimately is not to teach you programming,

is not to teach you C or PHP or SQL or any number of the words

and acronyms in the course's description,

but rather to teach you to solve problems more effectively

and to think more methodically and more algorithmically, so to speak.

>> So I would propose that thinking computationally boils down

You need to input-- like the input to the problem--

you need an output, which is hopefully the solution,

and then you need a process by which to solve that problem, which

we'll call an algorithm-- a set of instructions for solving some problem.

>> But first, let's focus on the first and the last of these inputs and outputs.

Computers after all, apparently only understands zeros and ones.

Even if you're not familiar at all with what's underneath the hood,

you probably at least heard that computers understand binary--

just zeros and ones-- but how can you possibly do anything interesting?

>> Well, one of the themes of the class is going

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Week 0

familiar

represent

science

problem