Introduction to Computer Science and Programming using Python
This course will introduce you to the world of computer science and programming, giving you a flavor of the material to come. If you finish the course wanting more, Computer Science is likely for you!
This course has been developed by MIT and is available on MIT’s OCW platform.
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python is intended for students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems and to help students, regardless of their major, feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class uses the Python programming language.
Course Link: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-100l-introduction-to-cs-and-programming-using-python-fall-2022/pages/material-by-lecture/
⚠️ Under Review
This course is under review. The course has been designed to accommodate people completely new to programming. However, if you find the course difficult to follow, you can try doing one of the Intro to Programming courses and then return to this course. We would like to hear your feedback regarding this course, and whether you needed to do the Intro to Programming courses first. Please provide your feedback on this RFC: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/issues/1266.
Instructions
- Open the course link given above. You will see a list of Lectures.
- Clicking on the link of a particular lecture will present all the materials from that lecture to you.
- Work through all the course lectures as given in the link above. Watch the videos, do the finger exercises, and then solve the problem sets.
- There are links to solution of finger exercises on each lecture page. Match your answers to the given solutions to grade yourself.
- Each problem set come with a script and instructions to check your solution. Use them to grade yourself.
- You don’t need to install the full Anaconda distribution to do this course. See the notes section below for more information.
- If you are stuck somewhere, feel free to ask questions. You can join the OSSU chat for this course here: https://discord.gg/jvchSm9.
Notes
- You don’t need to install the full anaconda package to do this course. You can just download the Spyder IDE from here: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/latest. It comes bundles with python as well as some popular scientific python libraries (all the libraries which this course uses are included), but it is not as large or complex as the full anaconda distribution. You don’t need to set up python separately or anything.
- You can use VS Code, or any text editor/IDE you prefer. If you are using a text editor/IDE other than Spyder/Anaconda, you should note that the course sometimes ask you to run some additional statements after running a python file. To do so, run
python -i file.py. Then you can run additional statements.
- You won’t get any certificate for doing this course. If you really want a certificate, you need to do the faster instructor-paced 6.00.1x course on Edx on Edx. Certificate of an introductory course like this is not very valuable, so unless you are absolutely sure, we recommend you to do the 6.100L course linked above instead.
- If for some reason you want to do the OCW version of the faster paced 6.0001 course, you can do that here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-0001-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/.