I honestly don’t think I could have landed a job in a better course on Berkeley’s campus. The purpose of the course is to provide a rigorous but entertaining introduction to the field of computing for students who don’t know much about it. The curriculum for the course covers a wide variety of programming topics (from variables and functions to recursion and higher-order functions) as well as some of the societal changes that have swept the world since the digital revolution.

Spring 2011 is the third semester that the course has been taught at Berkeley and it’s been gaining a lot of momentum as a way to engage students with the wonder that professionals feel towards the field. Students get to work on two open-topic programming projects and write a blog post on relevant computing topics that they find to be interesting.

The course is currently a pilot for an upcoming AP computer science course and a number of schools across the world have expressed their interest in collaborating with us. We will be launching the course with a number of significant revisions in Fall 2011 at Berkeley and helping a number of other colleges and high schools across the country launch it simultaneously.

My favorite part about the course is that it gives students a reason to care about what they’re learning. Computer technology is a fundamental part of 21st century life, and demystifying a semester’s worth of concepts while framing them in the context of larger trends (digital privacy, Twitter, search, the future of computing, etc) seems to be a powerful approach for communicating a ridiculous amount of information in a meaningful and intriguing way.