CS50

I love Tangram and its simplicity to create endless possibilities with just seven geometric shapes – either according to a given scheme or through free creative exploration. I wanted to create a digital version that is as simple as it is aesthetically pleasing.

Anticipated: I used the chatbot Quack (CS50.ai) for questions about Scratch, about the logic of my code and for debugging when nothing worked. I was also helped by numerous YouTube tutorials from, amusingly enough, many creators who could be my children in terms of age.

Once the first “knot had been untied”, the next step was to expand the functions of the parts and transfer them to all seven other parts. As copy-and-paste proved to be inefficient, the better choice was to keep the code blocks centralized and work with clones of the same part.

This first version of my digital Tangram consists of three main screens – a preview image, a start image and the actual playing field. The playing field can be changed between four motifs and a blank. Each time a new game starts, the Tangram pieces shuffle and remain in a random position.

As a transition from Scratch and its prefabricated code blocks to C with more open code structures, various examples are compared with each other in which the same basic concepts of e.g. functions, conditions or Boolean expressions always play a role.
The different aspects of language also become clear, as there are different ways of expressing the same or similar things depending on the context and objective.

In order to write a simple program whose output is # symbols that imitate a staircase/pyramid, I used the common concept of describing the functional sequence in “pseudocode”, i.e. in words and mathematical terms, and then translating it into code in C .
The idea of “pseudocode” reminds me of, for example, sketching in design to quickly and easily describe variants before going into the details of the implementation.

For me as a designer, it’s exciting to understand new concepts and to see how programming creates analogies to concepts that are already common to me.
As already mentioned, I love the process of translating “pseudocode” into code on the one hand and comments on the other, which, among other form rules, make the code more readable. Methods that can certainly be applied to the design process.

The various degrees of abstraction of code language – from zeros and ones to assembly and source code – remind me of the structure of things in our physical world, from atoms to materials from which we form products, which is called compiling in computer science.
The creation of a program in source code can in turn be illustrated with the production process of a factory, existing tools (functions) from the internal inventory or from external libraries are included at the beginning, from which the program is then assembled.

We learned about different basic algorithms that can be used to perform tasks with different levels of efficiency, such as sorting by the size of different values.
The so-called binary search, which breaks down the large problem into many small and therefore easily manageable ones, usually performed best.

As with product design, a lot of programming seems to be about making the most efficient use of resources such as time and storage space. The perfect solution for a single problem may not solve another. So here too, you have to weigh up which resources you use to build a system as modularly as possible, or be satisfied with leaner but less flexible solutions. It is a compromise and one solution seems to be the standardization of components, similar to standardized components and suitable tools for industrial production.

I don’t want to talk so much about the core differences between C and Python, nor about Python itself, but rather about the logical structure of the lecture series, where weeks 2 to 5 cover the basics of how computers work and only later do we get into more detail about the daily use of languages, which expands my thinking capacity and helps enormously to understand the basics of programming and problem-solving approaches.

I admire the simplicity of SQL applications and the possibility of using simple code queries to display cleanly structured and, depending on requirements, sorted or filtered lists from data silo CSV (comma separated values) files, which are otherwise confusing to the human eye, cleanly in the code editor.

For me a repetition, as well as an extension of my understanding of web applications and on what basis they are rendered in the browser.
The nesting and linking of different programming languages and the modular structure of CSS selectors and their application, for example, are always exciting.

It is exciting to see how quickly we can test passwords on standard computers using a small program in Python. As a countermeasure, companies rely on various methods: length and complexity requirements, blocking or delay after X number of failed attempts, authentication by a second – usually physical – factor. In addition, methods similar to encryption such as hashing, end-to-end or so-called passwordless passkeys are used.

Again, I am grateful for the opportunity to do this great course free of charge and online. For a short time, the lecture gave me the feeling of being a student again, even in the historic Harvard.

As already mentioned, apart from Week 00 (Scratch “Tangram”) and 01 (C), I did not work on the entire problem sets, but simply took extensive notes from the lectures and tried to reproduce the most important ones here, which has already taught me many exciting insights and new skills.