Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

Excellent class. It is a very serious introduction to programming, beyond the usual college introductory level. It discusses some data structures and a good number of algorithms. Its programming assignments are challenging. The presentations are exemplary in their precision and rigor. There is not one minute wasted during the lectures.

Prior experience: 1 year of computer science education.

This was my first MOOC, and up to this point, the most rewarding one. The way it approaches CS is the best I’ve seen so far, giving real examples of usage of all the concepts, it’s really motivating.

Regarding difficulty, it has the perfect balance: the challenges are demanding but not so hard that you feel frustrated or can’t complete it.

I totally recommend this one, but I advise you that if your only goal is to learn Python, maybe it is not the best choice, as you will use a lot of time on others subjects rather then just programming.

Finished this course with 98%. Very interesting and useful, even though, I’ve done it on my fourth year studying CS at the university.

I thought this course was HARD. Devoted many more hours to it than I anticipated and barely got above the passing mark. That said, I learned a lot and found it to be of higher quality than several undergraduate courses I took as an enrolled student at a respected university. I am not a programming type and my brain does not naturally take to this kind of material. If you have a thick skin and are interested in the topic, this is the course you want. Many of the concepts helped me substantially in understanding how to use other programs like R effectively.

This course has been my best online ‘tutorial’. Instructor approaches teaching from ‘first principle’ and for me that is the way to go. I was able to grasp the fundamentals of programming on the fly. I entered the course with the aim of getting first hand education on python programming to enable me write scripts for digital design as an architect but I chanced upon a requisite knowledge I never earlier imagined. Each lesson was modest in design, well defined in specific objective, and understandable information. It covered a wide range of lessons needed for computer programming and would recommend it for anybody who wants to learn computer science.

This is an excellent introduction into Computer Science using Python. The instructor is very clear in his explanations and the assignments are challenging, while also good learning experiences. This is a top level MOOC – excellent.

This is a well–crafted, fast–paced introduction to Computer Science, though a little dry at times. I think it’s based on the introductory ‘CS for non CS majors’ course at MIT.

The pace, relative complexity of some of the subject matter* and difficulty of a few of the exercises – I’m not a gifted programmer and I found a couple fairly challenging despite some background – might make it better suited as a second (or third) course for some, despite using Python (perhaps the easiest programming language to pick up). Rice’s IIP or Udacity’s CS101 – which I’d both done earlier – would both be good preparation (or fallback options, if you try this and find it too hard).

I just completed the final exam, which is untimed (you get a long weekend to complete it) & accounts for 25% of the grade). I seemed to test a pretty representative selection of the material, at a level comparable in difficulty to the homeworks.

*It includes introductory material on object orientation (including inheritance), recursion, data structures (trees) and algorithms (including big O notation, tree search).

This course is hard like other MIT courses. Be prepared to work a lot to perform well. A good news that it’s not that hard like previous course in functional programming. The second part is about scientific applications of python that is not very common for such courses but natural for MIT. Personally I was highly interested in Monte–Carlo simulations.

I don’t consider this an introduction to Python. They expect you to solve some of the problems without giving you the information in the lectures.

An excellent introduction to thinking computationally. I liked the instructor, and the exercises and problems sets largely struck a nice balance, being challenging but not discouraging. The midterm and final, though, I found very difficult.

The pacing of the class is also a little uneven: we lingered over the easier topics early on, but then sped through more demanding topics, such as object–oriented programming, toward the end of the course.

In summer last year, I took this course as my first course to learn CS and I was satisfied with the quality and rigor of this course. I learned many CS concepts and did practice with tons of programming exercises. The professor’s high quality lectures and active discussion forum were really helpful. I think the high quality of edX platform itself also contributed to my success in this course.

I just finished this class. It was much harder and moved much quicker than any other MOOC I have taken. I learned a lot, but it was a lot more work than I had really anticipated. I am a complete novice with no programming experience, so perhaps that was my fault.

I did finish (just this second) and did get a good grade, but I put far more time and effort into the class than I had expected. Be prepared!

As an example the first 3 ‘week’ projects are due 4 days apart (Thurs, Tue, Fri due dates) so the ‘week’ concept was a bit misleading. Again, I really enjoyed and learned a ton, but I hope others know their expectations.

Also a lot of the work is self taught. You need to go out and find the answer far more than expect the answer to be in the videos or exercises.

The many practice quizzes are very useful and I could follow the first half of the course but when I encountered a problem with an exercise around the middle of the course I couldn’t solve it and since I was too busy to find other help (e.g. books/resource persons), I was stuck and gone off track with the course schedule. So I had to drop this course. I’d recommend this course if you have someone around who already knows programming because as with other computer stuffs, sometimes a small thing can get you stuck and you can look at it a million times and still can’t see where the problem lies.

Great course! But you have to work a lot, not get frustrated and be ready to think out of the box and get out of the comfort zone to solve the problems.

One of the things to take away from this course for me was that coding of complex programs is not done alone. Brainstorm with some one else if the approach you are taking to solve the problem is on the right track. Pseudocodes are important.

Another thing I learnt in this course is that they make you work hard on the Problem sets so that you are well prepared for the Finals. You may have difficulty winning the battle but you will win the war because you are well prepared for it.

At the end of it, it’s real power when you tell the computer what you want it to do and it does that!

The course moves very quickly and has required 20+ additional hours of work weekly beyond the instruction. The lectures are very contained in their scope, but the scope of the problems jumps far beyond the lecture and requires much unsupported research (really guessing, in many cases!). This problem could be easily rectified with a more gradual evolution of problems. (Bridging problems between the current short end–of–lesson questions and complex weekly problems.) On–screen the graphics are difficult to follow with a very small font making it hard to see key characters. The execution screen is full of past work and so that with the phrase “Let’s see what this does!” it is unclear (and obscured) what was typed in and what resulted since you visually have to jump from the code screen to the execution screen in the midst of lines of text (and again, a very small font). And while this may not be the typical “requirement” of a college course, the examples of where and in what context a given code might be utilized is much better provided in other online courses. The course content on the whole is solid but half–baked in execution with poor visuals, pacing, and contextual application to the real world.

Course is really good, maybe a little easy. I think it would be more difficult for a beginner which is the audience it is targeting.

This course covers a lot of ground, so it may be demanding for a beginner. However, if you have some programming experience and just want to get all you knowledge into a system and learn some python it can be pretty manageable. Problems sets can be challenging, but not if you’ve solved similar problems in another language. So I recommend it to someone who has done at least a CodeAcademy course, so you wouldn’t feel thrown into a deep end right away. Otherwise it’s a great course. I personally enjoyed the instructor’s sense of humour and barely contained enthusiasm for the subject.

I’m taking this class as a refresher and as a way to dig into some sorting algorithms that I haven’t used in awhile but if I was new to coding/python, I would find this class to be very confusing. The lectures aren’t presented very clearly. The slides are disorganized, often times with the professor making random, nonsensical scribbles that are more distracting than helpful. When you do see the code example screen, there’s old code, unused code, and sometimes superfluous code that would be extremely confusing to a beginner. Topics in the first few weeks don’t seem to build on one another in a very logical manner. The exercises seem to be very pedantic in nature. The tests that run against your solutions to the exercises require the solution to be entered in an exact format. So for example, if you enter in “1,2,3,4” your solution will be rejected since the tests is looking for “1, 2, 3, 4”. There’s a bit of irony in that a class on programming doesn’t have a test capable of parsing out the solution you input. Maybe I’m not paying as much attention as I should, but I swear there are exercises that ask you to use concepts you wouldn’t know about from just having watched the lectures. In addition to these issues, there are some community TA’s that seem to be almost combative in the class discussion forums. I’m really hoping that this class improves the deeper in you get. I’d imagine that a lot of people take this class purely based on the prestige associated with the MIT name but if you’re new to coding you’d do yourself a favor by either taking Harvard’s CS50 or grabbing the topics in the course and finding one of the hundreds of bootcamp blog posts that cover these same topics.

The lectures and text book for this course are nearly worthless. The first couple of weeks are easy, because I knew some python coming in. But when the material gets difficult, you are essentially on your own. The exercises and the problem sets bear very little relationship to the lectures. The teacher seems sometimes more interested in showing tertiary level details than in explaining the main concepts. Not recommended.

A life–changing MOOC. I take this MOOC aside from my work as a government clerk in China in 2016, which is very unsatisfactory. At that time, I was 24, graduated from an Econ & Business university, beaten by the humiliating experience of working in a rigorous hierarchy, and most relevant, never touched programming.

This MOOC helped me to recognize my potential in the field of computer science. It is demanding, even might cause you scratchingly uncomfortable. But it is definitely a worth try. As the saying goes, “good things take time”.

I finished the course a bit more than 2 years ago, and guess what? From a speck of humble dust in the giant bureaucratic machine, to a first–year Bachelor student of Computer Science at a recognizable university at the age of 26!

My life trajectory is running on a new track, and in the determination of this amazing transition (it is especially hard if you are from the developing world where the society is not so tolerant), I’d say this MOOC plays a fundamental role.

Thanks to edx, thanks to MITx!