Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python - Coursera

Spoiler alert: I might have discovered Coursera through some Access Now email I received. Coursera is the online educational learning site that offers the amount of courses you can choose to learn. It's basically allowing you to mimic the university experiences and useful for any student who hasn't gone to the university yet in the future. It's available globally but it is banned in some of the countries for reasons unknown.
This course is about the basic game design kind of programming in Python where you write in the respective codes that will make the games work. It will start off from the console level to the GUI level. And as you progress through the course, there may be various functions you will need to learn so that you can use them in the mini-projects. Speaking of mini-projects, the further parts of the courses were tough for me that I needed some help from the internal forums for solutions. Unfortunately, I followed the solutions with like either minor or major modifications to them to make things more original. But the difficulty was what I had like the lesser amount of original codes in the first place for further mini-projects. Besides mini-projects, there may be quizzes/homeworks to do in Coursera as well as the lectures to take a look at. Just like the actual universities, there may be slides and videos of the lectures which can be found on the internet. Hell, certain universities have their official YouTube accounts and they have the video lectures like that. Overall, even though I failed some of the mini-projects, I still managed to pass this course with 74%+. By getting 70% and above, I got the Statement of Achievement. Another certificate upon fulfilling this is optional but then, you will need to pay some money for that.

However, you may notice that the final average score for this course in the illustration is inaccurate but the way I calculated was that I totalled up both Quiz Scores and Mini-Project Scores respectively before getting the average scores for both of them. After that, I got the final average score of two averages but that's not the point because the full quiz score is about 1/3 of the total course score with the mini-project having 2/3 so their calculation must be quite deep for that.