Say Whaaat?? First Day of CS 100

So I'm behind a bit. New Year's thoughts to follow. But first...



I took a class Fall 2010 called Digital Civilization--you've probably heard me talk about it before. (And guess who's a TA for the class THIS semester?? That's right--I AM! Woot woot!) From this class I developed an interest in the principled use of media and digital culture and generally becoming more computer-savvy. So I was like, hey, why don't I take Computer Science 100 this semester? It's for non-majors (and I'm about as non-major as you can get), so how hard could it be, right?

Wrong.

I am out of my league, to say the least. Today in class we covered how to convert decimal numbers (numbers like 382 in our regular, base 10 system) to binary (base 2 system--the 1's and 0's we've heard about in computers before) and... I got lost.

I haven't taken math since my senior year of high school (calculus), and we were doing long division in class today--don't they have calculators for that?? Yeah, I was having troubles--kind of pathetic.

But it will be okay. This foray into the field of computer science will be a challenge for me, and I've never taken a class that I haven't been able to conquer. This will be a great learning experience. I'm going to have to adjust to computational thinking and programming languages, but I learned Latin, didn't I? Yes, I did, and I can learn this language too. Per aspera ad astra! (Through adversity to the stars)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go over my notes on binary conversions.


Photo credit: Brenderous on Flickr