Hello, my name is Charles Severance. I'm a Clinical Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, and I'm your instructor for this course. This course is a little different than every programming course that I've ever taught, or I've ever taken. This course is dedicated to the notion that every single person on the planet needs to be able to write programs and can write programs. You do not have to have a bunch of math. I do not expect math. I do not expect that you've taken any other programming classes. I don't expect you know anything about computers. I think no matter what your background is, you can program. That's why it's called Programming for Everybody. I have a couple of goals. Certainly, I want to teach you how to program. But actually what I really want to do is teach you how to take a programming class because it turns out that most of the other programming classes in the world are kind of difficult. They sort of assume way too much and the teachers sort of don't even realize how much they're expecting from students. So when you're done with this class, you can go and take another beginning class. And that way you have this as an on-ramp to all of your programming activity. And so I'm really excited that you're here. Another thing that I want to do is I want to teach you how to be a mentor. I want to teach you how to be a teacher of programming. So I want you to take all my ideas, and I want to you to help the next person. And the reason is that learning how to program is a little sort of foggy, uncomfortable, you get stuck on things, and those things aren't hard, I assure you. But when you're stuck on them, they feel really hard. And the best way to get unstuck is get some help from somebody. And if they're sitting right next to you, and they can go, "Oh look. You've just got to like add two spaces and it's fine." And you're like, "Oh, that saved me a lot of time." So I want you to be willing to help somebody else. Another thing that's important to me is that I want to create more teachers. Whether they're at universities, or community colleges, or high schools, or even middle schools, or in professional situations. I have given you all of the materials for this course at a website. They're all licensed under Creative Commons, the slides, the autograders. I want you to in a sense adopt this textbook, and then use my teaching kit so that you can become a teacher of this material, because I don't think that I'm naturally the only teacher of this. And in particular, if you don't speak English as your first language, you might want to teach this class in your native language. And so that's another reason that I give you these materials with a free and open copyright that you can take them, you can translate them into your language. The book has been translated into several languages. And that's really exciting. Those books that have been translated are usually free and available. You can get print copies that are very inexpensive and all the ecopies are free. And so this notion that I create this kit, that you can then change the kit. You don't have to just take my class. You can change it and you can make it work for you locally. And really, the overall goal of this is more than just like teaching you one programming class. I think that the entire technology marketplace, and to some degree all of business in general is becoming increasingly technical. And too many people, young, old, regardless of education, are shut out of this sort of club where you need to know something about technology. And so that's why we're Programming for Everybody. Regardless of geography, regardless of ability to pay, regardless of if you have any disabilities, I want Programming for Everybody to be everybody. I want when to just expand forever the number of people who are capable of programming. It's an open self-sustaining ecosystem, and have you be part of that self-sustaining ecosystem. So again, welcome to the class. I look forward to what you do and I look forward to seeing you throughout the class.
