edX is an open learning platform that hosts courses from a range of universites and organisations. As I am a self-taught programmer (my formal education was art, design and music) it is useful to me to get some idea of where I sit academically. I like to self-study and one of the main problems is knowing where you sit from a rubric perspective against a curriculum.
(completed March 2025)
Note: it is against the pledge to show any examples or references to the midterm exam questions. All python files in the midterm folder are encrypted and only visible to the person with the decryption keys.
This course was passed and completed on the 21st March 2025. It was a nice refresher for python basics, but where this course really shines is the Big O and complexity lessons. Whilst they don't go deep, it doesn't take much reflection to understand the necessity of embedding this mode of thinking into your practice.
As an example, many of the Hacker Rank 90 day challenges allow you to fall into the trap of offering O(n2) solutions only to then "psyche" you with timeouts on the test cases. Understanding the order of preference in Big O is an easy win in being not only a better programmer, but also more efficient with CPU resources and ultimately the time between a user "doing a thing" and the machine "giving the thing" which is essential to the first usability heuristic.
I'd been using and programming in Python since 2007, but I certainly took something away from this course - algorithmic complexity, Big O and the role it plays in a solid computer science foundation. Especially to those of us that are self-taught.