Computational Thinking with Javascript 1: Draw & Animate

Overview

This is the first course in a sequence of four courses that develops essential 21st century computational thinking (CT) skills using the popular JavaScript language as a vehicle. At the end of this first course you will: know a framework for CT to help you learn about it and work with others; be developing your CT skills so that you can more easily work with digital technology of all kinds; be able to read and write programs in JavaScript that involve drawing and animation, using a specialised library; and post your creations on the web so that others can appreciate your skills. This course is suitable for: complete beginners; those who have taken an introductory course in any programming language and want to learn more deeply about the thinking and learning skills they are starting to develop; those who wish to learn Javascript in a supportive environment. The follow-on courses explore the manipulation and analysis of data, such an important aspect of our lives now, again in a highly supportive environment, and then we move the context to mainstream web--based platforms so that you can use these skills more widely.

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.