What's with all the free CS programs? How about a free law or pre-med curriculum?
Don't you know?
Everyone with a 3 month bootcamp can be an engineer now!
CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#132How can I actually use this course? When I try to Sign Up as a student I need a Registration Code. I don't have such thing since I am located in a different country.
I can shine some light on this since I worked on the project from day 0, before it was even called CMU CS Academy.
The initial vision was to provide a free, online, world class CS curriculum for high school students. What this means is that CS Academy's curricula are designed to be taught in a classroom to high school students. Teachers and their classroom environment were considered as first class citizens in the design, which means a lot of CS Academy's value is its complement of (still totally free) teaching resources and professional development seminars. teachyourselfcs.com et. al. solve a different, but equally important, use case for learners who want to teach themselves CS in a self-paced fashion. CS Academy chose to attack the high school CS curriculum because there was (and still is) a clear lack of world class solutions, and we felt we were best suited to take on that particular challenge.
That being said, according to some of the comments, it sounds like there are workarounds to sign up as a Mentor if you just want to play around with some of it.
Disclaimer that these are my opinions only, and not those of CMU/CMU CS Academy. I am no longer actively working on the project.
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t CMU’s curriculum. It’s a much simpler one made by CMU students and targeted at middle and high school students.
Made by CMU students _and faculty_. David Kosbie and Mark Stehlik are two of our most celebrated teachers, and the course creation has extensively involved veteran TAs from our intro undergrad courses. This is not a random unsupported student project.
It's still not the curriculum that CMU teaches its students. Self-studying through it will not give the learner anything remotely similar to the knowledge a CMU student majoring in CS gets.
For ambitious autodidacts hoping to do something like Scott Young's MIT challenge, this is crucial information to have.
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have to ask ourselves: too expensive for what? Berkeley has a 7 billion dollar endowment. I am sure they could have found the budget to make the videos compliant. They simply chose not too.
Endowments can't be spent.
UC Berkeley's annual budget is 3 billion dollars. I still think they can afford this.
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Made by CMU students _and faculty_. David Kosbie and Mark Stehlik are two of our most celebrated teachers, and the course creation has extensively involved veteran TAs from our intro undergrad courses. This is not a random unsupported student project.
It's still not the curriculum that CMU teaches its students. Self-studying through it will not give the learner anything remotely similar to the knowledge a CMU student majoring in CS gets. For ambitious autodidacts hoping to do something like Scott Young's MIT challenge, this is crucial information to have.
no, of course it's not, it's targeted to high school students, which is very clearly stated in the page: "WHO IS IT FOR? 8th + 9th grade [...]".
It's designed to be a high school curriculum that doesn't suck. Many US high schools do an incredibly poor job of teaching computer science, if they even try at all.
Now, that said, the AP part of it is based upon our intro course, 15-112, and if you take the full year of it through CS academy, you're getting a big chunk of what we teach our students in one (often first-semester) course - and we'll give you CMU course credit for it. But that's a first-year course that's designed to prepare you for the rest of the CS curriculum, not .. what we teach you in the other 7.5 semesters.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam
(In case it's not obvious, I'm a CS professor at CMU. I've taught the course I'm discussing above, 15-112, together with David Kosbie, one of the creators of CS academy.)
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a parent member of a PTA, I can say most parents I speak with or attend the meetings demand coding, robotics and chess as part of the curriculum. My questions about increasing arts, drama, music, natural sciences, mindfulness, civics, etc etc are usually met with polite nods and comments along the lines of "I thought you said you have a science PhD and worked at like Cal Tech or something?" So, supply and demand a…
As a chess player myself, why are parents demanding chess in the same category as coding and robotics?
The people I talk to associate it with math skills. No evidence, they just assume
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#137I hope they don't take it down like how Berkeley CS videos were taken down.
You can't find them anywhere? Not even Archive.org? Please tell me you can find them somewhere .
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm finding it hard to parse your argument. Are you saying that large organizations would rather have cheap-but-mediocre programmers than good-but-expensive programmers? Why would this be a benefit to them, surely they want good programmers?
Companies are focused on short term profits 98% of the time
Top tech companies could reduce comp by lowering hiring bars and wages. They don't think it's worth the cost.
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#139Is it still worth learning computer science when ChatGPT can do everything? Is fishmonger the only viable career left for humans?
Is it still worth learning anything other than computer science?
Re: CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those were taken down because of some complicated lawsuit about use of public funds to make available content that wasn't accessible to people with disabilities. It was too expensive to make the recorded lectures work with tools used by people with disabilities, so the university took down the content instead instead of spending even more resources making it compatible with screen readers, adding captioning, etc. CMU…
This is the most wtf thing I have heard all day. Basically "me can't have so you can't have." It's like shutting down a public Library just because it doesn't have a ramp for people with wheelchair. Do people really go hmm 10 out of 100 people cannot have it so the other 90 will not have it too. Doesn't make sense.
It's also the reason why you can't get most college textbooks as an ebook, because ereaders are deemed not compliant for the blind: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague...
I don't understand anyway since screenreaders are a thing on computers and smartphones and you can load an ebook into either. Meanwhile a paper book either needs a very expensive braille copy or some kind of complicated electronic shit to read the book for you.
My guess is the publishers knew ebook piracy is a thing and bribed some officials to use the ADA line.