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6001x Course Philosophy

The document provides an overview of the course philosophy for an introductory computer science course on edX. It aims to offer a challenging course comparable to the equivalent on-campus MIT course. Students should expect to spend up to 15 hours per week to complete assignments requiring strong Python skills, critical thinking, and time management. The course emphasizes independent learning through research, practice, and discussion. Staff are available to help students but will not provide direct answers. Their goal is to teach computational methods while also introducing Python programming concepts.

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Fatima Fayyaz
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58 views2 pages

6001x Course Philosophy

The document provides an overview of the course philosophy for an introductory computer science course on edX. It aims to offer a challenging course comparable to the equivalent on-campus MIT course. Students should expect to spend up to 15 hours per week to complete assignments requiring strong Python skills, critical thinking, and time management. The course emphasizes independent learning through research, practice, and discussion. Staff are available to help students but will not provide direct answers. Their goal is to teach computational methods while also introducing Python programming concepts.

Uploaded by

Fatima Fayyaz
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Course Philosophy

The staff would like to thank you for your interest in this course! We hope you will take the
time to read through the following few points about the course. It will give you a general feel
for what you should expect in terms of workload, the course structure, and most importantly,
what we hope you will get out of it.

From the beginning, the creators of this course wanted to offer a MITx course through edX that
is on par with the “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” offered on campus at
MIT.

This is a hard course. It is easy to get discouraged, but don’t! As you will notice from the first
assignment, there are many components and in order to successfully complete all parts, you
have to:

 understand the relevant subtleties of the Python language


 critically think about approaches to solve the problem
 have good time management skills
 pay close attention to deadlines

You have to put in many hours, especially if you have never coded before. The course
description does say that no coding experience is necessary, but as with anything else, prior
experience will make it easier for you. We are sure that students with no coding experience
have completed the first assignment perfectly, but they probably put in a lot of work, asked
questions, and after some frustrating but rewarding hours, managed to get the correct code. It
is our intent that over the entire course, students should be able to get the work done in at
most 15 hours a week. If, on average, you are spending lots more than that, let us know.

We encourage research and independent learning. This goes back to keeping this course on
par with the MIT campus one. Independent research comes in many forms. But ultimately, it
comes down to paying attention, repetition of the concepts, and practice practice practice! Your
research can be done in many forms:

 try out code in your Python development environment (Canopy, IDLE, or whatever)
 read the Python documentation or other Python tutorials
 use a paper and pencil to sketch out solutions
 if you have the textbook, read the relevant sections
 post to the forums

This course does not aim to just teach programming. We also teach computational methods.
As such, we may not cover every detail of the Python language. Otherwise, this would become
a course on “Introduction to Python”, which it is not. If you are unfamiliar with Python, we have
posted many Python resources available online. The forum participants, staff, and community
TAs are also willing to help you if you have a question about certain Python constructs.

The staff and community TAs are here to help you. We cannot stress this enough!

 We are here to offer suggestions to put you on the right path.


 We are here to clarify Python language subtleties.
 We are here to fix bugs in the course content.
 We are here to have interesting discussions.
 We are NOT here to give away answers.

If it seems that we are curt at times, please try to understand why. While we are happy to post
an explanation a couple of times, it becomes tedious and counterproductive to post the same
explanation many times. We would rather be helping a student understand logic of their code
rather than, for example, telling yet another student to check the Full Output button when their
code does not run correctly with the grader. We expect students to search the forums for
similar problems and read the instructions carefully.

We are all here to learn computer science be it from the videos, the exercises, or each other –
we distinguish this course from other introductory computer science courses because of the
accelerated pace and focus on students critically thinking about problems. We will stress
practice as a very important part of learning. Start early and do little bits of exercises every day
(during lunch breaks, 10 mins of goofing around on the Python shell every now and then, taking
a piece of paper and a pen to your kid's soccer game, whatever), the material starts to seep in.
This type of learning is highly encouraged.

This course will be offered every term. If you think you can’t keep up this time:

 Do your best!
 Keep asking questions!
 Keep trying out code in your Python shell!
 Try to learn as much as you can at your own pace!

Then if you try the next offering again, with the knowledge you gained this time, you will
conquer this course with more ease.

We know we can't please everyone but we thank you for your understanding. If you have
concerns about the course, please raise them in the forum. We can discuss them but let's not
argue. We will do our best to address them or pass them on to the course admins. We value all
suggestions but please keep in mind that the course cannot be drastically changed this offering.
Students and staff alike, we all want to make this an AWESOME computer science course! By
the n-th iteration, we will surely have reached a good balance of tough and rewarding!

We hope you will keep at it and we wish you continued success in this course!

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