This is a great project at CMU. Worked on it from the beginning as an undergrad.<p>It’s a very unique project: students have the ability to be involved in almost all of the roles of the project - from mentoring high school teachers to writing new course content and working on backend systems. There are 2 professors who oversee the project, and a handful of awesome full time staff to guide and manage the CMU students.<p>It’s crazy to see how it’s grown over the years. They just recently added an option to take CMUs 15-112 online with credit-by-exam at the end of the year: <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam</a>
For those who are trying to sign up:<p>Students are not meant to sign up directly. So you have to sign up as either a teacher or a volunteer (parents are this category). Then you will get a code. You need to use this code to create a student account.<p>This is not quite intuitive but I have a 12 year old kid and that is motivated me to dig around till I got it :)
This is a great project by CMU; however, it is designed for high school students specifically. An analogue to this would be Code.org. It is not related to their undergraduate CS curriculum which is rather rigorous.
How come this or things like <a href="https://teachyourselfcs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://teachyourselfcs.com/</a> dont exist for other fields like mechanical engineering?
How can I actually use this course?
When I try to Sign Up as a student I need a Registration Code.
I don't have such thing since I am located in a different country.
It's not a "computer science curriculum" but a "graphics-based computer science curricula in Python" <a href="https://academy.cs.cmu.edu/course-info" rel="nofollow">https://academy.cs.cmu.edu/course-info</a>
For only $10 more, they'll send you three pounds of fries served in a greasy paper bag, a Terrible Towel, and a Donnie Iris cassette single of "Ah! Leah!". It's the best deal in academia.<p>All jokes aside, if you'll allow me a tangential but relevant aside, a lot of people have heard of Carnegie Mellon, but very few have heard of Richard Caliguiri or David Lawrence. They were both mayors of Pittsburgh, and both led the city through urban renewal and revitalization plans that accurately foresaw the decline of the steel industry and consequently redirected resources to future-forward endeavors -- in this case, academia. Fast forward almost fifty years, both CMU and UPitt are world-class institutions, a plethora of industries (finance, robotics, healthcare) are thriving, and the city is widely seen as one of the most living cities in America.
I usually just recommended Harvard's CS50 as it is a very high quality introduction course (To be clear I was not a Harvard or any _fancy_ university).<p>Is there any better course available?
When I clicked the link, I expected a full CS curriculum but a very few courses from CMU. What I see in the page is not a curriculum or am I missing something? Nice copywriting, though.
Nice project.<p>Their curriculum is very VERY far from a completed CS curriculum. Maybe the project is not finished, and when it is it will cover everything that a computer scientist needs to know<p>But for now I think it is misleading.
I wonder if soon all elite universities will make all of their curriculum and lectures free online, effectively turning them into content marketing to drive their customer acquisition funnel. The actual product will be a prestigious brand name, networking opportunities, and a laundered IQ test performed by the admissions committee anointing you with the stamp of approval at the gates.<p>In the public's mind one goes to an elite institution for access to elite education, but, with everything being free and ungated, there should be little meat left to support that argument. I realize it's not a fresh hot take, but until recent it was still plausible to justify the high prices with the excuse of learning. Don't think that will fly for much longer.<p>I wonder if they could get rid of the antiquated teaching portion of universities altogether and just keep the "gated access exclusive club for people of your social or cognitive tier" portion of it. It's somewhat of a YC model too. There's some pedagogy during the batch, even though nowadays so much of their great content is on YouTube, but the value is mostly in everything else you get.
I always find it disappointing when people equate CS to programming. In my view, programming is a at most a means to an end in CS. A tool that we use to show that something is possible, to implement a proof of concept. By looking at the code we can understand in a formally defined language how certain systems work. It is definitely an important tool in CS, and a practical skill that CS students can use in their professional life after graduation. But I become rather sad when I see three Python programming courses being put together and people call it a CS curriculum.