Harvard CS50 Course Review

 Introduction to Computer Science or popularly known as CS50, is a great intro course into the world of programming. It’s a watered down version of computer science to get the ball rolling. What you can expect from the course is:

·         Learn Computer basics

·         Learn C programming

·         Learn Python programming

·         Learn HTML and CSS

·         Learn Java for Android App Development / Swift for IOS apps

·         Learn to make GAMES using Lua

There are many pros for doing this course including;

-Easy to understand lectures; I believe if I was doing this course in person at Harvard, I would have switched my course very fast from Engineering to Computer Science J

-It is self-paced; this means you can learn at your own pace and there is no rush. The deadlines for assignments and projects are December 31^st which is 5 months away as of this writing. I liked this as there were days, I could do 3 lectures in a day if I was in the zone and other days, I didn’t do anything.

-Real time results; This was an awesome feature I wasn’t expecting. You can get feedback on your in less than 30 seconds using check50 command. It was so good I thought it was an actual person doing the code review but it was just a really great A.I. Moreover, you can even get feedback on the style of your code using style50. What I mean is how your code is structured from beginning to end, the aesthetics and the readability. This is really great as coding at high level would require your code to be pretty to look at and easy to read and understand. This is crucial if people are referencing your code or when you’re writing code as a team.

-Lots and lots of assignments; One of the great things about this course is the amount of work you have to do as assignments. The assignments start off easy but increasingly get harder as you move from one lecture to the next. They are a good way to recap what you learnt during the lecture and also go further as most of the problems require you to do adequate research to solve them.

There are very few cons for this and they include;

-There was no C++; I liked doing this course as it was a great way to remind myself of C and Python from a great place like Harvard. For someone who programs a lot in C++, I was really looking forward to refresh on C++ concepts but nonetheless, the C and Python were great.

-Structured answers; This really bored me. When you are submitting your assignments, you have to stick strictly to their format otherwise, you will fail the assignments. I found myself spending most of my time formatting my code according to their format which is annoying at times. I hope they have flexible marking systems in future.

Take away

The CS50 is a clear illustration of how great online can be and how relevant what you’re learning is to the real world. What I really liked about this course was how easy it was to follow through the lectures, do the assignments, get results in real time and fully comprehend the concepts. Given the current Covid-19 situation, online learning is the way to go for education and from what I have seen and heard, our Kenyan systems are not to par. In universities, they are still teaching assembly language which is obsolete and have not updated to teach new languages like Python. Moreover, you learn the languages yourself without any guidelines from the university, just theory that no one really pays attention to.  We are a long way from achieving this as Kenyans but the great thing is, we are slowly getting there.

 

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