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Overview Working well with your fellow learners is an important part of an online course. So, at the beginning of this course, we’d like you to take time to "break the ice" and get to know each other. You may already know some of your fellow learners or hav...

When you hear the word computer, maybe you think of something like a beefy gaming desktop with flashing lights. Or maybe you think of a slim and sleek laptop. These fancy devices aren't what people had in mind when computers were first ...

Welcome back. In this video, we'll be learning how huge devices like the analytical engine grew, I mean shrunk into the computing devices that we use today. The development of computing has been steadily growing since the invention of the analy...

Pioneers in Computing and IT Computer technology has come a long way since the first computer was invented. Along the way, many people from diverse backgrounds contributed inventions and innovations that helped us get to where we are today with modern compute...

By the end of this video, you'll learn how we can represent the words, numbers, emojis, and more we see on our screens from only these 256 possible values. It's all thanks to character encoding. Character encoding is used to assign ou...

Remember when I said that a computer is a device that stores and processes data by performing calculations? Whether you're creating an artificial intelligence that can be humans at chess or something more simple like running a video game, the mor...

Logic Gates Knowing how logic gates work is important to understanding how a computer works. Computers work by performing binary calculations. Logic gates are electrical components that tell a computer how to perform binary calculations. They specify ru...

By the end of this video, you'll learn how we can represent the words, numbers, emojis, and more we see on our screens from only these 256 possible values. It's all thanks to character encoding. Character encoding is used to assign our binary v...

You might be wondering how are computers get these ones and zeros? It's a pretty question. Imagine we have a light bulb and a switch that turns the state of the light on or off. If we turn the light on, we can denote that state is one, if the...

Binary is the fundamental communication block of computers, but it's used to represent more than just text and images. It's used in many aspects of computing, like computer networking, what you'll learn about in a later course. It's important that you understa...

When we interact with our computers, we use our mouse, keyboard, or even a touch screen. We don't tell it the actual zeros and ones, it needs to understand something. But wait, we actually do. We just don't ever have to worry about it. We use the concept of ab...

In the last video, I mentioned that people don't need to understand how a computer works for them to use it, because abstraction makes things simpler for us. That's technically true, but since you're stepping to the world of IT, you do need to understand all t...

We have a lot of people that have nontraditional backgrounds that have made it here at Google. I've worked with people who have history degrees. I work with people who have economic degrees, and they're writing scripts, automating us on how we can process thes...

New terms and their definitions: Course 1 Week 1Abstraction: To take a relatively complex system and simplify it for our use Algorithm: A series of steps that solves specific problems ASCII: The oldest character encoding standard used is ASCII. It represents...

Isn't the history of computers supper interesting. I love going back in time and seeing how we got to this exciting point in computing. You've already taken the first few steps to building your foundational knowledge of IT. Before we dive deeper, I'll just tak...

Let's face it, computers are everywhere.  You come into contact with them at home, work, the airport, the grocery store. You're using some type of computer to take this course. You know what? There's probably one in your pocket right now. While computers are ...

Before we get our hands dirty with learning how to build a computer, let's talk theory first. In an earlier lesson, we talked about binary and how computers perform calculations. Remember that our computer can only communicate in binary using 1's and 0's. Our ...

Supplemental Reading for CPUs CPU cache and overclocking In this reading, you will learn about the various levels of cache for central processing units (CPUs) and how a CPU processes and executes instructions. Additionally, you will learn about overclockin...

Changes in diversity with regards to IT support specialist is something I noticed for the last several years. There is a lot of stereotypes in the industry. But I think what was unexpected was how many people actually break that mold? The people I've met in th...

If someone asked you, calculate the square root of 5,000,439,493 would you do the math by hand? Unless you really love tedious math problems, you'd probably use a calculator. What about binary? Well, you probably wouldn't calculate binary by hand either. There...