[mynameisvlad]

The University of British Columbia also has something similar, CS110 which uses a subset of Racket (Beginning/Intermediate/Advanced Student Language) to teach core CS concepts to a wide range of students.

The course videos are all available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7dEjIUwSxSNcW4PqNRQW8w/pla... and I believe the "Systematic Program Design" courses on EdX are an expanded version of the course.

[Zombieball]

Interestingly there is a common tie between Mudd and UBC: Maria Klawe (a truly inspirational woman). I would t doubt she had her part in both these courses.

[inevitable2]

As a general rule, college presidents don't get involved in course creation--even at small colleges like Harvey Mudd. In this case it would have been hard for her to have had a part since the course was created before she arrived.

[mynameisvlad]

Just based on her timeline at UBC, I don't think she would have. CS 110's first pilot offering was in 2009 (I was one of a few dozen students to choose it over the existing CS111) whereas she left the department in 1995, and the school in 2002 (between those she was involved in the faculty of Science as a whole). At most, she would have been part of the early planning stages or discussions of the course, although perhaps she could have been an informal advisor through the years after her departure.

[xasos]

Really interesting that UBC uses Racket for the intro CS course, because UWaterloo does as well

[mynameisvlad]

Oh really? Huh, I didn't know.

I can say that I really appreciate what was done in CS110. I learned about a bunch of topics that would have been taught later on in other curriculums like recursion, graphs, lambda calculus, first class functions, and even implemented minmax. Granted, I took the pilot offering which has since been scaled down (lowest common denominator of student and such) but there were a lot of concepts which just couldn't have been taught efficiently with something like Java, which has a lot more syntax to learn before even being able to get to the meat of the course.

That said, the course is definitely not for everyone. People that taught themselves other languages before coming to UBC generally found it to be too easy at first, wrote the course off as being stupid, then started lagging slowly as time went on and more advanced topics got introduced. I've TAed the course a few times, and have seen that come up a lot. Also, of course, the people that just couldn't grasp the concepts in the course. But overall, it was a fairly well-attended class, with lots of people from across the school (it counted as as a computation course for Arts majors and was easier than Calc 3 :) ). Really cool to see the different ways people would approach a problem.

[pakled_engineer]

U of Chicago uses HtDP with typed racket. https://www.classes.cs.uchicago.edu/archive/2014/fall/15100-...