Status check!

[elz]

I'm planning to post lecture 4 today, but I also thought maybe we could do some brainstorming. How are you doing so far? Finding anything confusing or the pace too fast? Would it be helpful to have some simpler, less MIT-ish problems to warm up with? A weekly chat option to go over things or watch the lectures? Partners to work on the problem sets with?

Fire away with any ideas and suggestions!

Comments

[elz]

Maybe we should take a break next week to review/consolidate all the stuff from lectures 1-4?

I feel like we haven't learned what we need to know to actually do the problems!

Yeah, that's definitely true. It's kind of like "Lecture 1: introductory stuff!, Homework for Lecture 1: go learn Python on your own!" Which is kind of nuts if you're not a full-time student.

And the math is making me gulp.

*nods* I think the problems are mathier than they necessarily need to be. I've definitely been out of school long enough to freeze in fear at the mention of logarithms, let alone anything more complicated.

[gchick]

I suspect the mathiness is actually designed to be, y'know, *fun* for the intended audience -- nothing we've seen so far actually requires math skill to solve the problems, and they're kind of cool and interesting math facts, so I have to assume that it's there as culturally appropriate random subject matter. But that doesn't make it less brain-bending when you're out of practice or just plain non-mathy. It would be better to have problems that are both differently written and more explicitly broken down in terms of the programming skills they're targeting.

When DW+OTW rule the world, beginning programming classes will be full of students who say, "I think get the programming, but I just can't wrap my head around this Yuletide Matching problem!"

[quartzpebble]

Review and consolidation! That sounds awesome.

I've been not quite keeping up the pace but have been feeling fairly good about the material (but then, I've been *missing* doing mathy things in the job I'm in). At the same time, I've been looking at other people's solutions and seeing that they're taking different approaches than me in structuring their programs, and I feel like a review post might put information together in a way that might help me see things from different angles.