Scott Rixner
This two–part course introduces the basic mathematical and programming principles that underlie much of Computer Science. Understanding these principles is crucial to the process of creating efficient and well–structured solutions for computational problems. To get hands–on experience working with these concepts, we will use the Python programming language. The main focus of the class will be weekly mini–projects that build upon the mathematical and programming principles that are taught in the class. To keep the class fun and engaging, many of the projects will involve working with strategy–based games. In part 2 of this course, the programming portion of the class will focus on concepts such as recursion, assertions, and invariants. The mathematical portion of the class will focus on searching, sorting, and recursive data structures. Upon completing this course, you will have a solid foundation in the principles of computation and programming. This will prepare you for the next course in the specialization, which will begin to introduce a structured approach to developing and analyzing algorithms. Developing such algorithmic thinking skills will be critical to writing large scale software and solving real world computational problems. Rice University is consistently ranked among the top 20 universities in the U.S. and the top …
Instructor Details
Courses : 6
Specification: Principles of Computing (Part 2)
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45 reviews for Principles of Computing (Part 2)
Add a review
| Price | Free |
|---|---|
| Provider | |
| Duration | 20 hours |
| Year | 2016 |
| Language | English ... |
| Certificate | Yes |
| Quizzes | Yes |
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A&Tower –
I love you teaching staffs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
David R –
A few of the programming projects were a bit tedious. If you’re not passionate about games like tic tac toe, it’s hard to maintain focus 🙂 I love the teaching however, very well done as usual!
Alex M –
If I wanted to learn programming from scratch, I’d take this specialization. They are great teachers and the recursion section was extremely helpful.
Jon Z –
buja!
wangcailearning –
it’s great!. The assignments are very interesting!!!I love this course!
Jordi C –
I have passed now the 4 first courses of the Fundamentals of Computing Specialisation and I have to say that I am very grateful to the instructors for the amount of new knowledge I got from working on this courses. At first I my aim on taking this courses was just to learn Python, but now I can see how much deeper the scope of this course is. I have learned so much more than just the syntax and grammar of a programming language. I have just started grasping the way information can be organised and searched. I have to say the 2 parts course Principles of Computing is not easy. The difficulty escalates exponentially as we move forward. You will need time to pass the projects and tests. Take it with calmly and seriously. Its worth it. A big thank you to the instructors for their efforts on making the learning way entertaining. Even just by trying to be funny you guys made it enjoyable. Highly recommended.
ravindranadh g –
excellent course to improve logic skills of programming
Krishna –
Excellent course!!! Choice of mini projects to apply the concepts we learnt was awesome. Excellent course structure, instructors, materials and everything. Loved every part of this course. Thanks for such wonderful course.
DAVID P P –
Very challenging projects and a very interesting way to learn about data structures. Lecturers are really great
Ian B –
Phew, this course was much harder than the preceding courses. Some assignments took many hours of work over several days. But it’s doable, and well worth it.
Hefu H –
I think the content of the course is very good. But I also feel that the last homework is a bit of difficult as some crucial parts of guidance is not given. It took me too much time to figure out the tile–moving helper function.
Tae J Y –
Tough! but very kind explanation and hard work! Thank you, teachers!
Arthur–Lance –
i feel powerful !!! 🙂
Arthur Lance –
i feel powerful !!! 🙂
Hassan B –
Although the hardness of the course compared to the precedent ones in the specialization but it was worth the effort , like the professors have said difficult but funny, five stars , keep the good materials. Hassan Bouchaala
RAVI R –
Must have course to build foundation on computational thinking.
matteo –
Nice course.
Daniel C K –
A rigorous, but short, computer science course. The projects for this class took widely differing amounts of time to complete. Some, I could do in a few hours. The more difficult ones, like the final project, took me days of thinking and coding to do. I highly recommend it, though. By the end, you’ll be a much better programmer.
Michael B R –
Great course, but the final project in W4 is very long compared the rest of the projects in this series of courses. Content is still top notch though.
Adel F –
Learned lots! One year down the line I was asked at a job interview about my past experience in python and gave this!
Albert C G –
Great Course – learned a lot – Great Projects
Jaehwi C –
The best course to study computer science for beginner!
Ganapathi N K –
Mind blowing
Andrew F –
Another fantastic course from the team at Rice University. The coursework is interesting and challenging, and I really feel I have learned a lot.
Siwei L –
very helpful course, the projects are challenging but interesting to work on!
Ken M –
great course – really gets you thinking about coding efficiently
Aynur Z –
Excellent course. I tried several similar courses on Edx and Coursera platforms and found this as the most efficient. The lectures are clearly stated and always accompanied by reading material, which makes it easy to repeat the material. Practical tasks are very interesting and help to develop practical skills. It is a wonderful opportunity to learn Python and fundamentals of computing. I highly recommend this course to everyone interested in this subject.
Tom S –
Very enlightening. Excellent assistance from staff.
Jeremy L –
I came to PoC Part 2 via Rice’s IIPP courses and PoC Part 1. The PoC series is a step up in difficulty from IIPP. The homework assignments usually took me several hours to complete and the mini–projects all took around 10 hours (maybe more) to complete. If you have lots of programming experience, I expect the mini–project would take you less time, at least once you’ve conceptualized how to solve the problem/project. And it is this thinking – rather than programming – that is the main thing the instructors want students to take away from this course. In other words, this is not an intermediate Python course. But it is a great class. You’ll get an introduction to searches, data structures, recursion, trees, and how to test your software. And like IIPP, the mini–projects are based a fun games.
Julian O –
Another entertaining and great course in the series with really well–designed and engaging projects. I am getting sad I’m running out of courses to take from Rixner, Warren, et al. They are superb. CodeSkuptor and OwlTest are really easy to use and handy tools (although I’ve had some issues with OwlTest not working all of the time).
Yoon–guu –
little bit hard to solve the assignment. Even though it took much more time to solve the assignments and practice activity, this class was awesome.
Yoon guu –
little bit hard to solve the assignment. Even though it took much more time to solve the assignments and practice activity, this class was awesome.
Jayadev H –
wonderfully fun assignments!:) Last one is killer… hardest one I faced on Coursera!:)
Sangil Y –
projects are tough at least for me it was but once you finish all the project, that rewarding feeling is just awesome
Amit m –
Great course.
Wang R –
17/5000 This course is of high quality but not friendly to Chinese students.
Kelly G –
Overall a great course, with a few glitches: 1. The tests for the homework are not working properly. 2. The amount of homework is a bit overwhelming for an introductory course.
Dinghan X –
the last week is really challenging but l like it
Rudy H –
Great course, I hope for more of this kind of courses. Invaluable skills gained from this course. High praise to all the professors. Thank You Very Much.
Max B –
Great continuation of part 1, with a bit more “true” computer science techniques taught. Challenging (but fun) projects each week. Make sure you put some effort into the practice activities each week. These will help you understand the weekly material better and prepare you for both the homework and projects. two thumbs up!
Roberto M P F M –
Great course! Each course is getting more challenging, and the way it is taught is simply great. It is easy to follow and still makes you think a lot. It is really rewarding finishing the mini–projects.
Omais R K –
Mini–projects hard and makes you wanna think all aspects which is a good programming practice. However, I believe theoretical depth is missing.
James T B –
Great course!
Steven K –
Very good course, especially the lessons on recursion and breadth–first searching. Lessons were very good and quizzes really served to reinforce material. Projects in this course were much more challenging than previous ones. Final project (15 puzzle) was very frustrating and didn’t seem designed to teach as many skills as previous projects; just seemed like it was designed to be complicated and difficult because it was the last project.
Arjun K B –
Excellent course and challenging assignments. Learnt a lot! Something which I did not like was CodeSkulptor, which is substandard for somebody used to running full fledged editors like VSCode/Atom. Also, the editor was relatively tiny on the browser on my smallish laptop screen. I understand that a lot of people are new to computer science and python, and might find it hard to set up a local development environment on their machines, but forcing the rest of us to use CodeSkulptor was a turn off. Even if I copy over the starter code, there would still be other classes used within it whose implementations I would not have. Other than that, I really enjoyed the course. Keep up the excellent standards!