📚 Learning & Skills Activities

CS50 by Harvard on edX (free audit). The most popular online course in history — 4 million+ students. Completely free to audit on edX. 12 weeks of genuine computer science from Harvard Professor David Malan. The problem sets are hard and that's the point. Certificate costs $199 but the learning is free.

Free Solo (2018). Alex Honnold climbs El Capitan's 3,000-foot granite face without a rope, and the crew filming it had to look away at points because they genuinely thought they might witness his death on camera. Free with a Disney+ or Hulu subscription many people already have; won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Do schools kill creativity? — Ken Robinson (2006). The single most-watched TED talk in history, over 70 million views, and it's just one man arguing schools train the creativity out of children by treating mistakes as the worst thing you can do. Free on TED.com or YouTube; 19 minutes, funnier than the subject matter has any right to be.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari. Free at any library, or via the Libby app if yours does digital lending. Traces humanity from insignificant apes to the dominant species on Earth, and the central argument — that shared stories, not individual intelligence, are what actually let humans cooperate at scale — reframes a lot of things you thought you understood about civilisation.

Serial, Season 1 (2014). This is the podcast that genuinely created the true crime podcast genre — a single reporter re-investigating a 1999 murder case over 12 episodes, and it became the fastest podcast to ever hit 5 million downloads. Free wherever you get podcasts; still holds up over a decade later.