Learn to Program: The Fundamentals @ FIX University

Learn to Program: The Fundamentals

Jennifer Campbell, Paul Gries

Behind every mouse click and touch-screen tap, there is a computer program that makes things happen. This course introduces the fundamental building blocks of programming and teaches you how to write fun and useful programs using the Python language.

Announcements

Week 1 progress

Hi everyone,

We hope you're enjoying the course material for Learn to Program: The Fundamentals so far! If you haven't started yet, it's not too late: the first exercise isn't due until the end of the weekend.

Here are some notes that you should read carefully.

• Assignment 1 will be posted in the next couple of days, and we'll email another announcement when that happens. Assignment 1 will have you make use of all the lecture material in weeks 1 and 2, so when it's posted please don't get scared off!


• The Resources link in the navigation bar has a link to the Python Visualizer, which we will start to use in week 2. The visualizer shows you a picture of computer memory so you can see how Python manages information in a running program. We will have a couple of videos demonstrating its use.


• The Course Logistics link in the navigation bar contains a list of the coursework and how much each part is worth.


• In order to earn a certificate, you need to earn at least 70% on the course material.


• Exercise 1 can be submitted a lot of times — 100, to be exact. The rest of the exercises will be restricted to 3 attempts only.


• Each piece of work has a soft deadline and a hard deadline. The soft deadline is the regular due date, and the hard deadline is 1 week later. If you submit a piece of work after the soft deadline, there is a 50% penalty. You can't submit after the hard deadline.

We would like to thank everyone who has given constructive feedback on the discussion forums! We're pretty new to this MOOC stuff, and it's been useful for us to interact with people who have been letting us know what we can improve.

Best,
Jen and Paul

Wed 26 Sep 2012 2:00:00 PM PDT

Week 1 Video Volume

We increased the volume on some of our Week 1 lecture videos. We hope this helps!

Tue 25 Sep 2012 12:01:00 PM PDT