Reading: Read the two (short) articles by L. v. Ahn, "Games with a Purpose" and "Telling Humans and Computers Apart" (the first article covers material from Week 1's lecture, while the second article is for Week 2's topic).
Writing:
1. Write a couple of sentences describing your experiences with
computing. What do you use it for? School, entertainments,
socializing, etc.?
2. Why did you take this particular class? Is there anything you'd especially like to learn from it?
3. Tell at least one computing-related topic you'd like to see covered in the class.
4. Play a few rounds of any or all of the ESP Game, Peekaboom, or Phetch. Based on your experience and your reading of "Games with a Purpose", write a paragraph or two giving your thoughts on the idea of using people's leisure time to solve large computational problems. E.g. Do you believe that it will really come to be, in the near future, that extensive and broadly useful work (for instance, labelling images and thus improving web search) will be achieved using people's free/entertainment time in these ways? What are some of the challenges/roadblocks to realizing this nice idea? Do you have any ideas for similar or other ways to get useful things things done by tapping people's collective free/fun/entertainment time?