The missing semester of CS education

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding the down arrow key for 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom…

The content taught here is the highest payout thing you can learn, in my opinion. Certainly more important than actually writing code or learning algos. What this content covers should unlock iteration speed, which is the single greatest lever in learning and growing faster (on a computer). Thus it gives you more cycles to go back to improving your code, experimenting with algos, etc. Probably also highly correlated with upwards mobility in the software job market. Great seeing this under…

I'm glad to see there is a "Beyond the Code" section that discusses comments. Here's what I typically told my students in Intro to Programming" Good comments lend insight into the code. Reading the code itself tells you the what. Comments should explain the why. Comments like "i+=1; /* Increment i */" are of little value. However comments such as "We increment i mid loop so that we can peek ahead at the next value for a possible swap" are…

I was happy to see my alma mater introduce a class called "CS 193 Tools" that is taken by all freshmen. I never took it, but it started when I was a junior or so (~2014). A friend of mine pushed to create the course and helped TA it for a few semesters. Here's the course description: Learning Outcomes: 1. Understand Unix/Linux commands for navigating directories and files and manipulating files and folders. 2. Understand terminal commands for searching and…