A web development course wouldn’t teach a student any such skills, would it?
Maybe not. But it does teach a lot of stuff mentioned in my previous post:
" Navigable and responsive pages, user authentication, lazy loading (or a reasonable alternative), data updates across pages, cookies + session management (including options for your users to customize in order to comply with stuff like GDPR), consuming an API, having its own API to communicate with your database layer, your secure database, having the site hosted, secure HTTP - all this is just about the bare minimum for creating a public website (failing to do some of that stuff could even cause legal trouble). I haven’t even gotten into best practices, like breaking up stuff into microservices, CI/CD tooling (containerization, orchestration, CI pipelines), performance monitoring, security monitoring and scanning, database tuning, concurrency/parallelism/async/thread locks/mutations/multithreading, and on and on."
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Probably not, but it might be a good start for distributed systems. You could make a web development course very rigorous.
Also, if computers weren’t as absurdly fast as they are now, they might learn a few things about complexity, like not using linear search for everything and not building long strings as a series of concatenations of short strings (which depending on language may be very inefficient since the long string gets copied each time). These are the kinds of things that self-taught programmers often miss. (BTW, I can speak with some authority as a self-taught teen programmer who eventually attained a PhD in computer science.)
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If a student wants to learn CS theories, or if s/he wants to understand the mechanics of how concurrent agents cooperate in a distributed environment, maybe s/he should take such a course. But that’s NOT what we’re talking about. We’re talking about an intro and first web development course here.
Who knows what his web dev course has in it? None of us, and neither will the AO, most likely. We can debate until the world ends about what constitutes rigor and what doesn’t (I would argue that web dev sans advanced concurrency topics is still pretty advanced for HS).
The AO will see it is a AP-level course (as marked by his HS), and then make a subjective call. The marginal benefit from AP Physics C’s rigor (which I have never questioned), is not meaningful enough for the cost and risk associated with taking take it over AP Stats + Web Dev. That’s been my whole premise.
However, these are upper level courses that have college EECS course prerequisites, so it is likely that these are more in-depth and advanced than a college frosh level course available for high school dual enrollment.
100% agree for 485 (339 isn’t upper-level, but also is SI and not EECS). I was just responding to the funny claim that top CS programs don’t have web dev courses.
If the OP does choose the web development course, they may want to choose some other course in place of AP statistics, since a statistics course that will be required for CS will likely be calculus-based. If calculus-based statistics is available at the college for dual enrollment, that would be a better choice than AP statistics if the OP has already had calculus.
UMich has to accommodate a lot of different students. Let me know if you can find one at MIT.
Like I said, literally every top CS program. I wasn’t exaggerating.
That’s MIT OpenCourseWare. It isn’t an MIT course.
That’s MIT OpenCourseWare. It isn’t an MIT course.
I encourage you to read about what MIT OCW is before you make more false claims.
From the web page, it is actually a real MIT course 6.171 as taught in fall 2003, although 6.171 appears to be no longer offered.
However, it has prerequisites of 6.001 and 6.170, so it is probably higher level than a frosh-level college course with no apparent prerequisites like the course that the OP is considering.
Yup, a web-dev oriented course with no prereqs would be 6.148.
That’s what I meant. It isn’t a course that’s offered on its campus.
It has literally been offered on their campus? Whether or not it is offered in this semester is immaterial.
If you are looking for something that was offered this year, 6.148 fits the bill. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6) < MIT.
BTW, a lot of the other courses involve web dev too, although they may not be focused on it. But 6.148 is completely web dev. Web dev is the most prolific type of software engineering. Characterizing it as “trivial” is silly.
6.148 is a competition course. 6.171 is no longer offered.
So? If you are looking for a “normal” web dev oriented course there is 6.170, which was offered this year.
6.170 isn’t specific to web development. It’s a generic software design course.
The point is that MIT assumes its students can learn the basic web development skills on their own, if they’re interested.