I love it!

Brilliant!

Excellent!

Excellent!

excellent

Very good

Excillent

its good

Great

GREAT

good

Good

nice

good

nice

nice

Good

good

good

b

5

PROS: The course description appropriately targets beginners to the world of computational thinking and problem solving. The instructors provide a variety of universal examples to help students understand the step by step process leading to an introduction to python programming. The units are broken into very manageable lessons followed by quizzes and projects to assess understanding and provide an opportunity to apply what was incrementally learned.

CONS: There are jumps in content area knowledge when asked to move from instructional to mathematical logic. Personally, I had to do some googling to relearn basic mathematical skills to complete tasks successfully. It would have helped to have a transition or an example to refresh my math skills from over 40 years ago. Also, as an educator, I'm all for a peer review - especially, when peers are offering constructive criticism. Unfortunately, in this forum (not just UPenn Coursera courses), most students are just racing to get through the course and clicking on complete. I haven't any qualms with losing points to learn the error of my ways, but I lost a point to someone that commented, "Great Job!" without further explanation. With that said, there is also some discrepancy between the prompts and the rubrics. However, once you learn what to look for in the pattern of instruction and assessment, it's fairly easy to adjust.

The first 3 weeks were good content and testing, though i would request more questionnaires to test all concepts introduced. though i believe the content visuals & explanations could be improved, but that generally applies to most things we do anyway. Improvisation is a continuous process.

There is something humourous about the 4th week. The content and exercises appear to have been squished in with the same amount of haste like that of a student wanting to just finish the course( I was one of the students myself , so there!). The forum response rate went down as well (understandably!). In my humble opinion, the 4th week needed to be a bit more elaborate by at least 1 more week. More exercises with smoother notching up of complexity of exercises, testing out all possible concepts so that they get embedded deeper into the students' thought process irrespective of whether they take up computing later or not.

Thank you big time, Professors! :)

Overall I thought this course was very well done. It was at a basic level, so much so that you didn't need a background in computational thinking or mathematics to take the course. This was very nice!

The explanations were very helpful and the videos were well done. The instructors were overall quite engaging and the concepts were well-motivated.

I think the capstone problem (the Corpus example) could be modified to make it more engaging and interesting. I think a different problem would be more suitable, as the description of the problem was somewhat difficult to digest.

Some of the compiling and checking of the solutions was a little challenging at times. Sometimes you had the correct answer, but needed to alter the solution somewhat to fit the criteria of the test. This was not necessarily a bad thing, but it was frustrating in Module 4.

Overall nicely done!

Reece

Very interesting course for beginners. In my professional environment, I am rarely exposed to this type of problem solving through coding (I am a CPA), yet, this course took me from zero to having a better understanding about how to "think" like a computer. One recommendation I would make is to somehow show students, onscreen, for each example on the PowerPoints, how each line of code is interpreted by the computer. The latter would clearly show things like why indentation is so important or how the computer understands a loop. Lastly, although I received multiple emails from the available support, it comes a point where you need somewhat of a live chat. Again, I highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to wet his/her appetite for programming. Thank you for all the support and patience.