CS for All
cs.hmc.edu
CS for All
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Re: CS for All
#2>At Mudd, this course is taken by almost every first-year student—irrespective of the student’s ultimate major—as part of our core curriculum. Thus, it serves as a first computing course for future CS majors and a first and last computing course for many other students.
This is a great thing to offer students and I wish my University had made this a part of the curriculum. Somehow I managed to have practically zero exposure to computer science or programming until after graduation--only to discover that I find it immensely challenging, interesting, and rewarding. I probably would have switched majors if I'd taken this class Freshman year.
Re: CS for All
#3Beautifully written text. I also really like the idea of an intro course but am, probably like many others, struggling with how to present the topics in an interesting (and practical) way without missing the theoretical beauty of computer science.
This course reminds me a lot of the Berkeley course posted a month ago, if anyone wants to see the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838196. From what I can tell, the coverage is almost the same, except that the Berkeley course pretty much trades computer architecture for declarative programming and some other briefly-covered topics like machine learning, map reduce, concurrency, etc.
Re: CS for All
#4As a former student of CS5 (the class), I must say it was spectacularly well-run, fun, and educational. Zach Dodds, one of the authors of this book, was a particularly brilliant and inspiring professor.
While I'm an advocate for practical eduction, I'm equally an advocate for understanding the principles of your field. This book will much less vocational than your typical code-school/academy/etc and instead focus on building a foundation with which you can build upon.
I highly recommend this as a great primer to computer science.
Re: CS for All
#5Is there any way to download it in pdf format?
Re: CS for All
#6>At Mudd, this course is taken by almost every first-year student—irrespective of the student’s ultimate major—as part of our core curriculum. Thus, it serves as a first computing course for future CS majors and a first and last computing course for many other students. This is a great thing to offer students and I wish my University had made this a part of the curriculum. Somehow I managed to have practically zero e…
The University of British Columbia also has something similar, CS110 which uses a subset of Racket (Beginning/Intermediate/Advanced Student Language) to teach core CS concepts to a wide range of students.
The course videos are all available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7dEjIUwSxSNcW4PqNRQW8w/pla... and I believe the "Systematic Program Design" courses on EdX are an expanded version of the course.
Re: CS for All
#7>At Mudd, this course is taken by almost every first-year student—irrespective of the student’s ultimate major—as part of our core curriculum. Thus, it serves as a first computing course for future CS majors and a first and last computing course for many other students. This is a great thing to offer students and I wish my University had made this a part of the curriculum. Somehow I managed to have practically zero e…
I think it's a good idea, but fwiw it's not CS-specific. Harvey Mudd's idea isn't that CS is so uniquely important that everyone should take it, but rather than everyone should take a lot of things, regardless of major, and CS is one of those things. The curriculum is designed with a philosophy of fairly broad education, kind of in line with a liberal-arts college ideal, but with more of a STEM flavor. I was a CS major there, and only maybe 1/3 of my total course hours were CS: the split is roughly 1/3 in your major, 1/3 Common Core, and 1/3 "HSA" (humanities, social-science, and the arts). [1]
The technical part of the Common Core is currently: 1 course biology, 1 course CS, 1 course engineering, 1.5 courses chemistry (0.5 is a lab), 2.5 courses physics, 0.5 course elective lab, 3 courses mathematics.
[1] There's even a hokey triangle illustrating that philosophy in the course catalogue (p.26): https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/201...
Re: CS for All
#8Mudd Alumni here. I had the pleasure of being a student of Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas and Zach Dodds (who are two of the authors of this book). Amazing group of professors!
Re: CS for All
#9Is there any way to download it in pdf format?
https://github.com/emhill/117-S15/commits/master/src/morea/m...
Might be out of date. Looks like the book was built with Sphinx (documentation tool), so maybe you could find the source and build a fresh copy.
Re: CS for All
#10>At Mudd, this course is taken by almost every first-year student—irrespective of the student’s ultimate major—as part of our core curriculum. Thus, it serves as a first computing course for future CS majors and a first and last computing course for many other students. This is a great thing to offer students and I wish my University had made this a part of the curriculum. Somehow I managed to have practically zero e…
I think it's a good idea, but fwiw it's not CS-specific. Harvey Mudd's idea isn't that CS is so uniquely important that everyone should take it, but rather than everyone should take a lot of things, regardless of major, and CS is one of those things. The curriculum is designed with a philosophy of fairly broad education, kind of in line with a liberal-arts college ideal, but with more of a STEM flavor. I was a CS maj…
What do they cover in the basic general engineering course?