The Beauty & Joy of Computing featured in the New York Times

Dr. Daniel Garcia and his course “CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing” (BJC) are featured in a New York Times article about curricula designed to develop computational thinking in students.  The article, titled “Learning to Think Like a Computer,” covers strategies at a number of top institutions and highlights BJC, a CS course for nonmajors which focuses on the abstract principles underpinning computing instead of just teaching students to code.  “The idea of abstraction,” Dan says, “is to hide the details.”  Concealing layers of information makes it possible to get at the intersections of things, improving aspects of a complicated system without understanding and grappling with each part.  The abstraction of computational thinking allows advances without having to redesign from scratch and offers a new language and orientation to tackle problems in many other areas of life.