Seq26Nov12: Mailed November 19, 2012.
Mechanical MOOCsters,
We are now a week away from the start of the class, which begins November 26th. If you requested assignment to a group of learners, you’ll receive an e-mail this week with the mailing list for your cluster. In the mean time, whether you asked to be assigned to a group or not, please do the following:
Your Tasks:
- Watch Lecture 1 of MIT OpenCourseWare’s 6.00SC. If you’ve programmed before in another language, this will likely be review; if you are entirely new to programming, it covers some foundational concepts.
- Read the Getting Started PDF from 6.189 A Gentle Introduction to Python
- Install Python
Please note:The Python environment IDLE can be a little disorienting to some users. It has two distinct windows, an “interpreter” window, which has prompts (>>>) and immediately executes commands, and a “program” window, in which you write and save multiple line programs. Save yourself many bangs of your head on your desk by reviewing the following document.
Source: xkcd.com
Happy MOOCing!
The Mechanical MOOC
The Mechanical MOOC’s A Gentle Introduction to Python is a collaboration between Peer 2 Peer University, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenStudy, and Codecademy. For this course, Peer 2 Peer University has developed an email scheduler that coordinates student activity across the participating sites to facilitate collaborative learning. This email was generated by the scheduler. A full archive of emails for this course sequence is available here. For more information, please visit http://mechanicalmooc.org. For questions regarding the logistics of the course, please e-mail mooc-e@p2pu.org.
