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I think you misunderstand the purpose of the two courses. The overwhelming majority of students taking CS50 on campus will never take another CS course. Harvard
by objclxt 14y ago
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the two courses. The overwhelming majority of students taking CS50 on campus will never take another CS course. Harvard undergraduates are required to take a quantitative reasoning course regardless of major, which CS50 fulfils.
Both Harvard's CS50 and MIT's 6.00 are intended to introduce people with little or no experience to programming. However, the former has far more students with humanities and arts backgrounds. This requires a different approach to teaching. Neither course is 'better' than the other, and the student evaluations bear this out. The feedback I hear from contacts at edX is that both courses are being very well received.
The assumption you seem to be making is that the majority of people taking CS50 care about working in the industry, whereas they just want to find out more about programming. And that's not a bad thing.
- dschiptsov 14y agoI cannot look at it from a freshman's point of view, so I'm biased, but I definitely don't want it to be my only CS course. This is because I just know, that to understand, say, SQL (and NoSQL) there is excellent Database course from Stanford and it worth taking because it will pay back later. To understand programming you need CS61A (because it teach you whys) and then Data Structures and Algorithms. Then you can pick up everything you need from books. So, let's say that this is an Introduction To Coding (without deep understanding).