CS 1111

If you have any experience writing code, especially Python take 1111 with Upsorn. She really wants her students to learn and will answer any questions. The course itself is pretty easy if you've programmed before although some exams questions can be a little tricky since they can be technical. Professor Upsorns slides are also really helpful if you're stuck with homework, you could honestly get by with just reading the slides.

I love Upsorn. She's really sweet and entertaining and even shows us childrens' nursery rhyme videos when explaining concepts like pseudocode, dictionaries, and loops. If you already know a great deal of Python, please take her class! The only downside to the class is that she speaks REALLY quickly. I decided to take this class without taking any prior CS classes, with my only prior programming experiences being TI-BASIC on my calculator, and HTML on codeacademy. Make sure to do well on the first two exams and all the PA's leading up to those, because the assignments get much harder from there.

So this class says you need to have "prior coding experience" but you can pass the entrance quiz if you spend like a day on CodeAcademy. This class is nice because they only meet twice a week and there is no lab component (labs are done in the last half an hour on Wednesday and graded completely on participation) unlike CS 1110 which meets three times a week and has a lab yet you will cover the same material. About two thirds of the class was just python basics like functions, loops etc... so the if you do the CodeAcademy you'll be chillin. The last third is actually a bit difficult when you do things like Reading/Writing CSVs, PyGame, and Regular Expressions etc... so you'll want to pay attention for that.
More than half of your grade is made up of Program Assignments (PAs), one of which is a final project, so making sure you're getting 100s on all of them is crucial. I'd recommend working on PA's as early as possible and even during class so that you can submit them and get feedback from their automated tests. If you pass all the tests you know your code will get you a 100% on the assignment but the tests have a two hour delay so getting them done early is important. The PA's get harder exponentially and thus you'll breeze through them early, but will be putting in a good amount of time later in the semester. The Labs are also easy points for showing up. I have personal beef with the tests because in my opinion they don't test any useful skills. They'll write non-functional code that just exists to trip you up and make you parse through it. It was a lot more memorization based rather than code writing ability.

Professor Upsorn is one of the most passionate professors you can have here for an introductory course. She genuinely cares about every student and provides a lot of optional extra practice problems that are very helpful. Her slides are much more readable than any other of my professors and I often find myself sharing them with my friends in 1110. If you have any background in CS/coding, TAKE HER CLASS, CS1111! I self-taught myself Python with codeacademy for a few hours before the entrance exam for the class and passed it just fine. TLDR: Upsorn is the greatest, take her class, you won't regret it and you will love not suffering through the stupid and meaningless 1110 labs!!

Going against protocol, I took CS 1111 without any prior programming experience whatsoever (if you want to do this, I'd recommend watching a few youtube videos before the placement test so that you can try to pretend to know what you're talking about). Upsorn is an extremely nice, knowledgeable professor but her course fell short of my expectations for two reasons: 1) there was zero connection between the homework and the exams and 2) lecture often overcomplicated simple, intuitive concepts. The homework for this class consisted of 31 programming assignments that challenged you to solve practical problems using python. I'd say I learned about 95% of what I learned in this class from these assignments. Infuriatingly, their application on the exams was almost nonexistent. The 3 handwritten tests (yes, handwritten) called upon you to parse as well as write gibberish code that served no other purpose but to confuse you. Luckily, you do get practice exams with keys to help you prepare. I'd also recommend making a study going containing all of the basic python functions as knowing them can make many of the exam problems quite easy. Lecture I often found useless and boring, except for the exam review. Use this time to get ahead on the PA's, especially at the end of the semester when they can become quite difficult. Overall, not the most challenging course if you get your PA's done and prepare appropriately for the exams.

You should know that the tests in this class are highly memorization based, and that this professor does not give you all the information that you need to memorize. For this first test, I practiced coding a lot. That was a mistake. You really don’t need to practice as much as you need to memorize info. To get all the info you need, it was necessary to watch the lectures posted online by Tychonievich, the head instructor of 1110 and 1111. Perhaps the information is also available in the textbook, but Professor Tychonievich seems to explicitly state all of the information that shows up on the exam.