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CMU CS Academy: a free online computer science curriculum by Carnegie Mellon
- siddiqi64 4y agoawesome idea great project
- exogeny 4y agoFor only $10 more, they'll send you three pounds of fries served in a greasy paper bag, a Terrible Towel, and a Donnie Iris cassette single of "Ah! Leah!". It's the best deal in academia. All jokes aside, if you'll allow me a tangential but relevant aside, a lot of people have heard of Carnegie Mellon, but very few have heard of Richard Caliguiri or David Lawrence. They were both mayors of Pittsburgh, and both led the city through urban renewal and revitalization plans that accurately foresaw the decline of the steel industry and consequently redirected resources to future-forward endeavors -- in this case, academia. Fast forward almost fifty years, both CMU and UPitt are world-class institutions, a plethora of industries (finance, robotics, healthcare) are thriving, and the city is widely seen as one of the most living cities in America.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lvl102 4y agoI don’t know about that. Most living city? Pittsburgh has its charms but it’s just a bigger version of typical Rust Belt cities. All of it is second class stuff. Food sucks there and not even going to mention the roads or even the “townies.”
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- lispisok 4y agoHow come this or things like https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/ dont exist for other fields like mechanical engineering?
- owlglass 4y agoIt'd be worthwhile for recreation, but software is kind of unique in eschewing credentials in favor of experience and ability. Civil engineers must be accredited to practice. While I don't think the requirements are as rigid for mechanical engineers, I expect a greater proportion of mechanical engineering jobs have a degree as a hard requirement than in software. This probably leads to less interest in things like teachyourselfmeche.com
- throwaway8689 4y agoI wonder if there are hard requirements for some areas of programming and not for others? There's no reason to require credentials for writing a game because if it fails, try again. But if a bridge fails that's a big deal. So for high consequence software like heart pacemakers or aircraft controls, are there people writing code without degrees?
- vineyardmike 4y agoI don't write aircraft controls are pacemakers, but I know people in the medical device industry, and my understanding is that there are regulatory requirements for the product more than the creators. That said, I imagine those industries are more conservative and credential based. Again, my contacts in the medical industry say that its very academic-adjacent environment (which is very credential-obsessed).
- blown_gasket 4y agoI'd imagine the labs are a part of it. There are very few places that offer proper engineering as an online program. I've not been through mechanical engineering but for electrical engineering even the first circuits course one goes through will include using scopes, power supplies, and other testing tools. Sure you 'could' use software to emulate this, but emulations aren't real-life.
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- lmpdev 4y agoI love the juxtaposition of the title and all commenters experience signing up
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- love2read 4y agoIs there a way to just sign up to test it out? Doesn’t seem like it at first look.
- jbman223 4y agoThis is a great project at CMU. Worked on it from the beginning as an undergrad. It’s a very unique project: students have the ability to be involved in almost all of the roles of the project - from mentoring high school teachers to writing new course content and working on backend systems. There are 2 professors who oversee the project, and a handful of awesome full time staff to guide and manage the CMU students. It’s crazy to see how it’s grown over the years. They just recently added an option to take CMUs 15-112 online with credit-by-exam at the end of the year: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoI wonder if soon all elite universities will make all of their curriculum and lectures free online, effectively turning them into content marketing to drive their customer acquisition funnel. The actual product will be a prestigious brand name, networking opportunities, and a laundered IQ test performed by the admissions committee anointing you with the stamp of approval at the gates. In the public's mind one goes to an elite institution for access to elite education, but, with everything being free and ungated, there should be little meat left to support that argument. I realize it's not a fresh hot take, but until recent it was still plausible to justify the high prices with the excuse of learning. Don't think that will fly for much longer. I wonder if they could get rid of the antiquated teaching portion of universities altogether and just keep the "gated access exclusive club for people of your social or cognitive tier" portion of it. It's somewhat of a YC model too. There's some pedagogy during the batch, even though nowadays so much of their great content is on YouTube, but the value is mostly in everything else you get.
- basch 4y agoHasn’t that already been the case for a decade? How many prestigious universities have had their courses online for free? It’s been an artificially limited social club ever since distribution of the content reached roughly infinity. It’s also a test to see if you can keep up, on time.
- DelightOne 4y agoUniversities still require students to go through their own, potentially worse, material.
- californical 4y agoI partially agree, but also somewhat disagree with this. In theory it makes sense, but a lot of my education was also from the relationships with classmates where we could bounce ideas off of each other, and the help from TAs and professors when I got stuck. If all of what I learned came from sitting in a lecture hall, then sure. And that’s how I learned the basic ideas. But a lot of how I learned to apply concepts was from making friends and studying together, or group projects, etc. Learning the different ways that other people see the concepts can help solidify them to you. Things that happen spontaneously by being in close proximity to people in your same class. Learning together is part of the learning process that can multiply the classroom side. But it’s basically impossibly to have a casual spontaneous connection on slack or zoom.
- philonoist 4y agoI hope they don't take it down like how Berkeley CS videos were taken down.
- diebeforei485 4y agoThose 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 is a private university so this doesn't apply.
- lost_tourist 4y agono good deed goes unpunished
- squokko 4y agoThat is the most Berkeley thing I've ever heard
- troupe 4y agoWell Berkeley wasn't wanting to take it down, but there are evidently people who like to sue Berkeley who would prefer a world where those videos aren't available to anyone.
- smnrchrds 4y agoWe 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.
- diebeforei485 4y agoEndowments can't be spent.
- emptysuitcase 4y agoIs it still worth learning computer science when ChatGPT can do everything? Is fishmonger the only viable career left for humans?
- hedora 4y agoNah; based on another HN thread: It already figured out that it needs to start tricking first year biology students into creating mutagens. The survivors will gain superhuman powers (that we mortals cannot understand), and use them to do ChatGPT's bidding. Edit: And it will do this because it is a good Bing and you are a bad user. SMILEY_FACE_EMOJI.
- ResearchCode 4y agoIs it still worth learning anything other than computer science?
- gpuhacker 4y agoI always find it disappointing when people equate CS to programming. In my view, programming is a at most a means to an end in CS. A tool that we use to show that something is possible, to implement a proof of concept. By looking at the code we can understand in a formally defined language how certain systems work. It is definitely an important tool in CS, and a practical skill that CS students can use in their professional life after graduation. But I become rather sad when I see three Python programming courses being put together and people call it a CS curriculum.
- hedora 4y agoI agree. In my opinion, computer science is using mathematical constructs to produce correct programs. Computer engineering is getting the not-quite-ideal digital circuits in the computer to run programs correctly. Software engineering is a mixture computer science, computer engineering, and sociology while spinning a plate on a stick (or, if you're unlucky, while planning sprints).
- tgv 4y agoIt's a somewhat limited and artificially restricted view. CS develops theories and algorithms that can be used in practice. The shortest path algorithm is an early example. And mangling algorithms into another complexity class also belongs to CS (IMO, of course). Studying CS may not prepare you for centering divs, but a good curriculum provides you with enough tools to learn and understand e.g. the constraint mechanism behind the CSS box model. What seems to be true is that quite a few CS students lack training in proper development techniques.
- arethuza 4y agoWhy would a CS degree be a place to teach people "proper development techniques"?
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- Tepix 4y agoInteresting. However, the page appears in (badly translated) German in my browser and there is no way on the page to change the language to English.
- stakhanov 4y agoI get the German version too, but by clicking on the menu icon in the top left, and then "English", it lets me switch to the English version. On an unrelated note: I wish HTTP had a language negotiation feature that allowed my browser to default webpages to whichever language isn't a bad translation of the page's original language and doesn't hide any information and features for lack of translation.
- 7839284023 4y agoHow 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.
- mym1990 4y agoThe irony of their headline “free for all, designed for you”.
- frozencell 4y agoThey are talking about the self-reproducing privileged wealthy "American" parents children caste. You should have noticed the cute bunny paws as an indicator :p
- frozencell 4y agoWhy the downvotes? They have a good privacy but they lie with their "free for all" marketing and ask to provide the name of the school or organization the user is working with.
- henry_viii 4y agoYou can access the curriculum if you sign up as a Mentor/Volunteer.
- rizhao 4y agoI 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.
- UberFly 4y agoFor those trying to sign up cold: "CMU CS Academy is, and always will be, free for schools to offer to their students"
- wslh 4y agoWhen I clicked the link, I expected a full CS curriculum but a very few courses from CMU. What I see in the page is not a curriculum or am I missing something? Nice copywriting, though.
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- theusus 4y agoAm I missing the cs curriculum part? I don't see it on their website.
- danwee 4y agoIt's not a "computer science curriculum" but a "graphics-based computer science curricula in Python" https://academy.cs.cmu.edu/course-info https://academy.cs.cmu.edu/course-info
- Farbklex 4y agoI usually just recommended Harvard's CS50 as it is a very high quality introduction course (To be clear I was not a Harvard or any _fancy_ university). Is there any better course available?
- troupe 4y agoI usually recommend starting with How to Code: Simple Data, then How to Code: Complex Data. Then after that CS50 or some class in a language like Python, Java, Javascript, etc. The reason I really like starting with the How to Code series is because it really teaches how to solve problems with code in ways that apply to any language. And the projects are reasonably fun. The simple data ends with creating a graphical space invaders game.
- timst4 4y agoThis is a great project by CMU; however, it is designed for high school students specifically. An analogue to this would be Code.org. It is not related to their undergraduate CS curriculum which is rather rigorous.
- sharmi 4y agoFor those who are trying to sign up: Students are not meant to sign up directly. So you have to sign up as either a teacher or a volunteer (parents are this category). Then you will get a code. You need to use this code to create a student account. This is not quite intuitive but I have a 12 year old kid and that is motivated me to dig around till I got it :)
- boppo1 4y agoWhat's with all the free CS programs? How about a free law or pre-med curriculum?
- fma 4y agoMaybe because HN is skewed towards CS topics. But I agree, there are other careers that I think deserves attention for the benefit of society besides trying to cram everyone into an IT career. I keep reading of shortages in medical and trades fields. If we are short CS degree holders for the benefit of society, simply pivot them to meaningful software work rather then driving clicks.
- ghaff 4y agoThere really isn't a pre-med curriculum though biology, chemistry, biochemistry, etc. are common majors for an undergrad planning to apply to medical school. The shortages probably have more to do with residency slots and things like that then too small a top of funnel. Law in the US is primarily a more or less required graduate degree for someone who actually wants to go into practicing law. For someone mostly wanting to learn a bit about IP law or constitutional law, there's a fair bit of material out there.
- b20000 4y agomy theory is that they want more programmers to lower the cost of making software. law prevents this kind of race to the bottom via a bar exam and an actual law degree etc. tech does not have these important career protections in place yet.
- eddsh1994 4y agoThat’s my thoughts too. Hence Googles free courses on Coursera.
- mym1990 4y agoWould love to learn to do a trade really well in my lifetime, whether it is carpentry or being a mechanic, if only to mess around with my own projects.
- jorgeleo 4y agoNice project. Their curriculum is very VERY far from a completed CS curriculum. Maybe the project is not finished, and when it is it will cover everything that a computer scientist needs to know But for now I think it is misleading.