Computational Thinking with Javascript 1: Draw & Animate

Overview

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This is the first course in a four‑course sequence that develops essential 21st‑century computational thinking skills, using JavaScript as a practical and accessible vehicle. The course introduces computational thinking as a way of approaching problems, learning new technologies, and working effectively with others. You will be introduced to a shared framework for computational thinking that will guide your learning throughout the course and the wider Specialization. Using this framework, you will begin to read and write simple JavaScript programs that create drawings and animations with the help of a specialised graphics library. Along the way, you will reflect on how programs behave, how processes are expressed precisely, and how creative ideas can be turned into working computational artefacts. This course is suitable for complete beginners, for learners with some prior programming experience who want to develop their thinking skills more deeply, and for anyone who wants to learn JavaScript in a supportive environment. Later courses in the sequence build on these foundations, extending your skills to data, the web, and larger software projects.

Syllabus

Introductions - and starting out with CT using graphics in JavaScript

This module introduces the instructors for this course and for the longer Computational Thinking with JavaScript specialisation. A framework for understanding computational thinking is introduced and first steps are taken with JavaScript, applying it in the context of simple graphics - drawing and animation.

Solving problems / programming a task

In this module, you take the foundations you have learned about computational thinking, some early programming constructs, and your program reading skills, and you start to learn about writing programs for tasks.

More complex drawings, and how to handle their descriptions

As our drawings become more complex, their descriptions will quickly become unwieldy. To counter this, we introduce programming language constructs that allow highly complex drawings to be described in just a few lines. They're a bit harder to understand at first, but in the long term, they're essential.

Animations - and consolidating what we've learned so far

Drawing still pictures is one thing - but the process-oriented element of programming lends itself to animation - an activity taking place over time. In this module, we'll make use of all we've learned so far to create animations. Functions will be used in a new and important way - as a so-called "callback" - which form the foundation of interactive programming as we'll see in Course 3 of the specialisation.