Priyank Verma

Hi, guys. I am a very active participant of MOOC. In my previous post I shared my experience with LFS101x : Introduction to linux .And this time I am back with a new course.

It was summer of 2014, I was having my semester break. And 6.00.1x was on my enrollment list on edx. I was really excited to get started with it.

As this course says, it is meant for people with little to no programming experience, I was there having some programming experience but quiet a novice to python. And will to learn python was my driving force here (of-course the MIT and Honor Code Certificate were also there 😉 ) . I started this course around May,14 and managed to finish it with all the quizzes and psets by August,14. There by I got my honor code certificate issued on 15th of August.

The course starts with very gentle introduction to computing : Prof. Eric Grimson very effectively introduces us to legendary  problems in CS like Tower of Hanoi , Fabonacci series etc.

Each week they give a pset, based on the lectures delivered that week. And trust me guys, these pset are very interesting and kind off invokes the sleeping programmer in you.  It will be no wonder to see you are skipping meals to work on the psets. Psets sometimes get brainstorming and those hide and seek champion bugs really pisses us, but in the end it is fun, and coding is all about fun :).

By week three , in pset3 we build a Hangman game. They provided us with the distribution code which we were supposed to complete. This pattern helps to improve code reading habit and understand how to write well designed code.

By week 5 comes the first quiz. It was not that tough. I scored 94% in it. So nothing to worry about it. You can do that easily too.

Week 6 introduces us to OOP(Object Oriented Programming , for the non-programming people). And in the corresponding pset6 we coded an application to decrypt   the encrypted text present in a text file. It was amazing to see it working , and feeling like a cryptography expert for a while ;).

Week 7 and pset 7 was my favorite. We get to code a RSS reader in python using Tkinter as GUI library (of-course there is the template provided by them as distribution code) . This RSS reader fetched news from Google News according to the tags provided by the users (Cool na!). This was the project I will be continuing to make something out of it.

On the basis of this pset, I am working on a intelligent RSS news reader. (Stay tuned for that).

By the last week of the course they provide additional research videos highlighting applications of python and programming in various fields of engineering and medical.

Then it is there, the day has come for the final exam. Believe it was not too difficult at all. I passed it. And managed to get a score of 97% overall in the course.

There by i received my Honor Code certificate by edx.

At the end of this Post! I want to say It was great experience for me to learn from world best professors & its not last I’ll keep learning. If you are also passionate about technology and believe in learning then you can explore yourself with best universities of the World.