It seems like every day we hear about some way that computers are computation, are impacting all of our lives. Whether that's how social media is impacting our elections or maybe a consideration of whether we should adopt E-voting, or maybe it's about how machine learning is enabling all sorts of new developments in medicine, or maybe it's how the same machine learning artificial intelligence is replacing jobs. So, maybe you want to be able to control the temperature of your house from anywhere around the world, or have self-driving cars so that older people in our population can live independently longer. No matter what, what's clear from this is that in the 21st century, everyone needs to understand how computers work. Hi, my name is Dr. Beth Simon and I'm a teaching professor at the University of California San Diego. In this specialization, I'm excited to work with you, educators, who want to learn to teach block-based programming to k-12 students. Whether it's giving a simple set of instructions, or angry bird here can reach the green pig, or maybe it's calculating for a game, how we're going to determine whether the red or blue team has scored a goal? We'll learn how to teach block-based programming to students so that they can control the computer. In my 10 years of teaching computer science, I've focused on how we can develop classroom experiences for teaching introductory programming in a way that makes it more efficient, and more effective, and more fun for our students. I'm excited to teach you in this specialization the core programming concepts, and how to teach them in a block-based language. But it's important for you to know that no prior knowledge is needed for this specialization. That said, we're not going to teach you as if you are going to go off and become a software engineer at Google. We're going to teach you with an eye toward your being able to help others learn block-based programming. So, even if you have prior programming knowledge, you will learn a lot in this specialization. Additionally, throughout this specialization, we'll have sections specifically on the pedagogy of teaching programming as well as issues of creating a computing course that has an equitable approach. But it's very important to know that throughout this entire specialization, we're focused on having you create materials that you can use in your own setting, we're going to have you learn in ways that are pedagogically valuable and that you can turn around and use to teach, and that will also give you the opportunity to experience freely available curriculum out there the world that you can use. So, I'm really excited to have you join with me in a community of computing educators who are excited to teach programming for all students.
