The Course

Over the summer of 2020 my family and I were planning to go on a road-trip around Europe. Unfortunately due to COVID, that wasn’t possible. Now stuck at home I decided to do something productive and wanted to an online course. Looking through with my counselor we found edX. I chose to do an Introductory Computer Science course as I was always interested in CS, and thought this was a good time to try it out. So, I began doing the CS50x – Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard University.

The course is structured into weeks, with each week focusing and developing on different aspects of Computer Science through problem sets. Since this is an Introductory course it begins quite simple and gets more difficult and in depth as the course goes on.

The first week began with the fundamentals of CS and with a task of creating a game in Scratch, a simple programming tool.

The Scratch interface with my mini-game.

Then on the second week the course moved away from the simple Scratch to a more realistic and complex platform, the CS50 IDE. All other problem sets for the remaining 9 weeks were done on this IDE. I learned many different programming languages such as Java, C, HTML and Python. The problem sets were quite fun to do, solving different problems given by the course, using the programming skills we learned from watching the lecture video for that week. The course did get quite tough, but I enjoyed the challenge as it allowed me to learn even more effectively by searching for solutions to complex problems.

The CS50 IDE, with one of the problem sets code on screen.

In the end the project culminates into one big final project. For my final project I chose to do a To-Do List website, as I had quite a lot of fun during the web portion of the course because of the designing and creation that happens.

Screenshot from my to do list website

Once I completed the final project, I received an online certificate for finishing the entire course.

The certificate

Learning Outcomes

In terms of the learning outcomes, I have ‘Identified own strengths and developed areas for growth’. I have found my different strengths in terms of CS, and also my weaknesses where I should practice more to develop. I have also undertaken challenges by doing this course, as coming in with no background in CS, it was quite a challenging course, but I was able to work hard through it, and get it done.

Overall, this course was quite a learning experience and a great way for me to see my interest in CS, and I know that if I was to further pursue CS, I have the introductory means to do so.

For more info on the course: https://cs50.harvard.edu