Computer Science Basics

What you'll learn

• ✦Explain what a computer is and how the CPU, memory, and storage each do their job
• ✦Describe how everything — text, numbers, images — becomes ones and zeros
• ✦Count in binary and convert small numbers between binary and decimal
• ✦Explain how text and numbers are encoded with bits, bytes, and standards like ASCII and Unicode
• ✦Describe how a program goes from source code to something the computer runs (compiled vs interpreted)
• ✦Explain what an operating system does and why every device needs one
• ✦Define an algorithm and explain why the same task can have fast and slow solutions
• ✦Build an intuition for Big-O efficiency — without any heavy maths — and tell data apart from information
• ✦Trace the CPU's fetch-decode-execute cycle, the memory hierarchy, and how logic gates compute
• ✦Appreciate abstraction, sorting/searching intuition, and the limits of what computers can do

Syllabus