The objective of this lesson is to give you a sense of how React works under the hood. One of the features of React is that you can use their JSX syntax, which is an extension of JavaScript, to create "components," as you'll learn shortly. React utilizes some of the browser's built-in functions (also called methods) like createElement and createTextNode to create these components. By showing you how you can accomplish the same goal without React, by demonstrating how to use these functions, you'll have a deeper appreciation for what React is actually doing under the hood. Of course, there are many other features and benefits of React, but by seeing this example, you'll realize that React is just an abstraction layer on top of plain, vanilla JavaScript.