Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science: Free online course from Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Deadline: 27 May 2021
Open to: students with some prior programming experience in Python and a rudimentary knowledge of computational complexity
Benefits: free 9 week course taught by MIT instructors

DESCRIPTION

Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a coeducational, privately endowed research university founded in 1861 — is dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. Through MITx, the Institute furthers its commitment to improving education worldwide. MITx courses embody the inventiveness, openness, rigor and quality that are hallmarks of MIT, and many use materials developed for MIT residential courses in the Institute’s five schools and 33 academic disciplines.

6.00.2x is an introduction to using computation to understand real-world phenomena.

6.00.2x will teach you how to use computation to accomplish a variety of goals and provides you with a brief introduction to a variety of topics in computational problem solving . This course is aimed at students with some prior programming experience in Python and a rudimentary knowledge of computational complexity. You will spend a considerable amount of time writing programs to implement the concepts covered in the course. For example, you will write a program that will simulate a robot vacuum cleaning a room or will model the population dynamics of viruses replicating and drug treatments in a patient’s body.

Topics covered include:

Advanced programming in Python 3
Knapsack problem, Graphs and graph optimization
Dynamic programming
Plotting with the pylab package
Random walks
Probability, Distributions
Monte Carlo simulations
Curve fitting
Statistical fallacies

ELIGIBILITY

6.00.1x or equivalent (some prior programming experience in Python and a rudimentary knowledge of computational complexity) needed as a prerequisite.

Unfortunately, learners from one or more of the following countries or regions will not be able to register for this course: Iran, Cuba and the Crimea region of Ukraine. While edX has sought licenses from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to offer their courses to learners in these countries and regions, the licenses they have received are not broad enough to allow them to offer this course in all locations.