4 ms·

I'm in the middle of taking the course, and while I enjoy it, I wish the prerequisites mentioned the heavy emphasis on math. I don't have a CS degree, nor do I

by bmj 14y ago

I'm in the middle of taking the course, and while I enjoy it, I wish the prerequisites mentioned the heavy emphasis on math. I don't have a CS degree, nor do I have a background in advanced maths, so I find myself struggling with the assignments and in-class exercises.

vassvdm 14y ago
hey bmj, you say you're taking the course now? My understanding is that this course is over - do you mean all the material is still available, including the corrections/grading and certificate-awarding system even though Odersky & team are no longer working on it behind the scenes?
- bmj 14y ago
  Yep, all material is still available, but I don't believe you can submit your work for a certificate. I just wanted a structured way to learn Scala, so I wasn't interested in receiving a certificate for my work.
  - pohl 14y ago
    I'm 100% sure one cannot get a certificate. It's not clear whether one can submit homework via sbt to the automated test suites on the server. Have you tried that as an experiment?
    - bmj 14y ago
      No, I haven't.
kscaldef 14y ago
I'm a little confused by your comment, but as someone with an advanced math degree I might just not have noticed what you're referring to. Can you point out what in the course you felt involved a heavy emphasis on math?
- bmj 14y ago
  The very set of exercises had me working on Pascal's Triangle and binomial co-efficients. The exercises continued to work through math problems. While I'm sure this stuff is old hat for many programmers, I often struggled with the basic algorithms in the problems. I realize many of these are "basic" problems for CS folks, but I don't have any CS training and never took a math course higher than high school pre-calculus (many moons ago), and learned programming on the job. I'm not criticizing the course, either--I am managing to pick up the language, but I just wanted to note both my struggles with the course, and the tacit prerequisite of a reasonable background in math.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I believe this is because the exercises were ported from the SICP, which is itself designed for MIT undergraduates.

by bmj 14y ago

vassvdm 14y ago

hey bmj, you say you're taking the course now? My understanding is that this course is over - do you mean all the material is still available, including the corrections/grading and certificate-awarding system even though Odersky & team are no longer working on it behind the scenes?

bmj 14y ago
Yep, all material is still available, but I don't believe you can submit your work for a certificate. I just wanted a structured way to learn Scala, so I wasn't interested in receiving a certificate for my work.
- pohl 14y ago
  I'm 100% sure one cannot get a certificate. It's not clear whether one can submit homework via sbt to the automated test suites on the server. Have you tried that as an experiment?
  - bmj 14y ago
    No, I haven't.

kscaldef 14y ago

I'm a little confused by your comment, but as someone with an advanced math degree I might just not have noticed what you're referring to. Can you point out what in the course you felt involved a heavy emphasis on math?

bmj 14y ago
The very set of exercises had me working on Pascal's Triangle and binomial co-efficients. The exercises continued to work through math problems. While I'm sure this stuff is old hat for many programmers, I often struggled with the basic algorithms in the problems. I realize many of these are "basic" problems for CS folks, but I don't have any CS training and never took a math course higher than high school pre-calculus (many moons ago), and learned programming on the job. I'm not criticizing the course, either--I am managing to pick up the language, but I just wanted to note both my struggles with the course, and the tacit prerequisite of a reasonable background in math.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I believe this is because the exercises were ported from the SICP, which is itself designed for MIT undergraduates.