By tim, on November 11th, 2012 at 3:49 pm Whew. Suddenly, after five relatively straightforward weeks, 6.00x has kicked up into a higher gear. I’ve just got to the end of this week’s lectures, finger exercises and problem set and it’s been far more taxing than anything, including the midterm exam, that preceded it. The main theme of the week has been an introduction to object-oriented programming, with various concepts (exceptions, classes, instances, inheritance and so on) being used for the first time.
This is the part of the course, while not being totally new to me, is the part that I’m least familiar with. All of the ‘production’ . . . → Read More: edX 6.00x week 6 – going up a gear
By tim, on June 16th, 2012 at 11:05 am As promised, I’m now going to spend a little time reflecting on the experience of 6.002x as a whole.
1. Course content
As I said in my first post-mortem post, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more digital and more practical electronics in the course. There were a couple of weeks where I honestly thought I’d joined a maths course rather than an electronics one. However, having survived the whole experience I believe that the maths really was necessary to gain a proper insight into the subject. The content delivered was coherent and usually interesting (but please, the . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x: post mortem 2
By tim, on June 12th, 2012 at 6:28 pm Now that the final exam has finished and the only thing that appears to be happening in the 6.002x forum is a lot of bickering about certificates, I thought I’d write a couple of posts to finish my journey off. This first post will simply look at how I did in the final exam. In the second post, I’ll reflect more generally on the experience and document what I thought was good / bad / indifferent about 6.002x as a whole.
The final exam had 10 questions, each with a number of different parts (1 mark per part), with 47 . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x: post mortem 1
By tim, on June 10th, 2012 at 8:13 pm
The chart shows I gained a total of 86% overall – meaning I miss an ‘A’ by 1%. Rats!
As always, the questions I answered on the final exam seemed fairly straightforward and the ones I didn’t attempt seemed impossible! Even if I’d not made a silly mistake on one of the parts of the questions I did answer, I’d have still been short of the 87% mark by around 0.2% – and there definitely wasn’t another part question anywhere on the paper that I could have answered.
As the exam doesn’t formally close for some late starters until . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x final score: close, but not close enough
By tim, on June 2nd, 2012 at 9:07 pm I’ve just completed the last homework (week 12) for 6.002x, so I’m running rather behind schedule as I haven’t even looked at the lectures for week 13 yet. Normally, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but as week 13 contains the final two sequences that could be tested on the final exam, I need to get a move on. Fortunately, in line with MIT practice, there’s no homework or lab for week 13. Equally fortunately, I’m very pleased that the Jubilee celebrations mean that I have Monday and Tuesday off next week too!
All being well, these lucky breaks . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x – almost time for the final exam
By tim, on May 17th, 2012 at 9:06 pm This week’s lectures have been about the response of networks to a sinusoidal drive and how to analyse them. First of all, this involved using an incredibly difficult method based on solving differential equations (so difficult that the attempt terminates part way through after much baffling mathematics), a “sneaky” approach based on complex algebra and finally a “super sneaky” approach based on the impedance model.
This final method turns all of the steady state sinusoidal circuit analysis problems which seemed pretty difficult using the first two methods into problems which can be rather more simply solved by the application of . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x week 10: (sine) waving but not yet drowning
By tim, on May 7th, 2012 at 10:04 pm This week’s theme on 6.002x was hard sums. Second order differential equations to be precise. However, for anyone still struggling to get through the lectures, don’t give up! It turns out that most of what we’re expected to do is find the characteristic equations of second order circuits – and that’s all. Certainly none of the lab work or homework required any difficult calculus.
Being exposed to all the maths was simply meant to be good for the soul apparently. I suppose that it does make sense to have at least a vague understanding of why circuit problems involving resistors, . . . → Read More: MITx 6.002x week 9 – the school of hard sums
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