📚 Resources 04 — Go Deeper on Thinking Like a Programmer
All free. All optional. Pick what matches how you like to learn — none of these are homework.
⚠️ Watch out: websites reorganize their pages from time to time. We link only to famous, stable homepages and tell you what to search for once you’re there. If a page has moved, the site’s own search box will find it.
🎮 Interactive (learn by doing)
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Hour of Code — code.org Free, browser-based, hour-long coding activities using drag-and-drop blocks. No sign-up needed to play. Best for: absolute beginners who want to feel loops and decisions before reading any more theory. (This is Exercise 4 of the lab — if you skipped it, it’s worth the hour.)
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Scratch — scratch.mit.edu MIT’s free block-based programming playground. You snap colorful blocks together to make animations and games — every block is a step in an algorithm, and loops and decisions are literal puzzle pieces. Best for: playful learners, and anyone who wants more after Hour of Code. Built for kids, genuinely great for adults; no account needed to experiment.
📖 Reading
- BBC Bitesize: Computational Thinking — bbc.co.uk/bitesize Short, friendly written guides with diagrams covering decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms — the exact four moves from this module. On the homepage, search for “computational thinking.” Best for: readers who want a second explanation of this lesson in different words, with quick self-tests.
🎬 Video
- Crash Course Computer Science — search “Crash Course Computer Science” on YouTube A famous, fast, funny 40-episode series. For this module, look for the episodes on algorithms (roughly episodes 13–15 in the series list): what algorithms are and how the same problem can be solved in faster or slower ways. Best for: people who like energetic 12-minute videos with animations. Don’t worry if some episodes race ahead of you — future modules of this course cover that material.
How to use these
If you do only one thing: spend a rainy afternoon on Scratch and try to build the tea-making algorithm from the lab as an animation. Making a cat actually follow your steps teaches exactness better than any page of reading — including this one.
When you’re ready, move on to Module 05 — Your First Code.