I decided to take this course because I wanted to further my understanding on algorithms and also get an introduction to learning Python. The course itself is provided by the University of Pennsylvania and upon completion, a certificate is distributed. It is supposed to help you better understand the way computers think and find solutions as opposed to how people are naturally programmed to think. The material itself was broken up with video lectures, quizzes, peer-graded assignments, and reviewing your peers.

WEEK 1: The Four Pillars of Computational Thinking

In the first week of the course, you are taught the four pillars of computational thinking, which are decomposition, pattern recognition, data representation and abstraction, and algorithms. Decomposition is when you take a complex problem and then break it up into smaller problems that are more simple to solve individually. For pattern recognition, you look at the entire problem and each of the sub-problems from decomposition and see if you can recognize shared patterns between them. If there are patterns found, then you can most likely use the same solution for each time the same pattern is shown. Data representation and abstraction is the act of figuring out which pieces of information in the problem set are important, which parts can be disregarded, and then how to represent the pieces that will be used for the ultimate solution.

#python #coursera