Tuesday, July 8, 2014

A Dip into Udacity

Over the last few nights I completed Lesson 1 of a Udacity course in Intro to Computer Science. I did it out of curiosity - I've been dipping in and out of various coding websites lately. This one introduced the programming language Python, which I had no experience in whatsoever, but none was needed. I actually really enjoyed solving the problems presented, which I can't say of my experience of high school mathematics! Here's an example:

# Write python code that defines the variable 
# age to be your age in years, and then prints 
# out the number of days you have been alive.

age = 38
days_per_year = 365
days_alive = age * days_per_year

print days_alive

13870

The goal to reach by the end of 7 lessons was to build a search engine and a social network. The first  lesson also introduced 'string theory' and it was challenging to understand, but not impossible! The rest of the course was not free, but you could sign up for a 2 week trial. I don't think I will continue this course, but I enjoyed the intro!

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