In my opinion, loops are one of the most powerful concepts of computer science, thanks to how much work they can save us. Before we learn about loops, let’s first introduce the new terminology for this lesson, starting with abstraction. Abstraction is the concept of removing details from a process in order to focus on the more important components. One way that we apply abstraction to code is by using variables.

This lesson will introduce you to Snap, an online drag-and-drop editor for building computer programs. We’ll cover the different sections of the editor and all of the color-coordinated categories of code blocks. This tool is best used on a laptop, desktop or tablet computer. You can access it from a smartphone, but it wasn’t designed for a small screen size, which makes it difficuilt (maybe impossible) to access and scroll to all areas of the screen.

In this Introduction to Computer Science course, we’ll learn how to use code to write programs that our computer will understand. Let’s first clariy a few terms that will come up along the way: algorithm - a set of instructions to complete a task programming language - a language the computer can understand computer program - a set of instructions, written in a language the computer can understand You may have heard the term algorithm before, especially if you’re interested in search engines like Google or YouTube and how they decide to rank their search results for their users.