This module taught me about Computational Thinking, Number Systems and Data Representation, some Programming knowledge and how to use HTML and CSS to create webpages. All of those were a new experience for me.

Firstly, I had never known anything about computational thinking before. This lecture helped me to understand the difference between computational thinking and human thinking and how to write code in small pieces to solve problems. I have learnt some flowcharts during my working life, but not in such detail. I think computational thinking will be present for the rest of my studies and work life.

Secondly, for the Number Systems and Data Representation, this lecture was a bit more challenging for me. I have studied Number Systems before, but Data Representation is new to me, and it was very difficult to understand to me. Through this lecture, I learnt how computers run and store data.

Thirdly, for the Introduction to Programming, I learned the basic programming concepts in this lecture. It introduced seven concepts: Variables, Expressions, Statements and Operators, Conditions and Branching, Iteration, Pseudocode and Comments. Variables are like boxes that store what we put in and of course it can take out. An expression is a code fragment that can be computed the result, and expressions have operator symbols and statements in them. Conditions and Branching will be well understood in the following example:

If A is less than B then output ‘foo’, if A is more than B then output ‘bar’, if A is equal to B then output ‘bee’. These are the three branches. Iteration is just repeating again and again, and we can use different loops(while loop and for loop) to do this. To make the code easy to understand, we can use comments, which are written differently in different computer languages. Pseudocode is not a real code, it is not limited to computer languages and can be shown to myself or others.

Fourthly, HTML and CSS are the languages used to write web pages, and there are a number of tags that can be used, with different tags being used in different ways. The CSS layout was one of the most interesting parts of the lecture, it can make a web page what you want it to be. After studying this lecture and writing a few webpages, they may not be perfect, but it is exciting enough for me.

Finally, through this module, I not only learned how to write a webpage, but also how to use Git and CMD. Learning computational thinking and basic concepts of programming makes learning a new computer language less difficult than before. This module lays a good foundation for learning algorithm data structure and programming in the future, and these knowledge have a great support for future study.

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