Algorithms on Khan Academy – a collaboration with Dartmouth College professors

Will a transcript or text alternative be available for these videos? (or can I help in creating one?)

How does this course compare with http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...?

YES! Thanks so much for helping put this together.

I've spent a lot of time looking for valuable resources on Algorithms, Data Structures, and other CS theory concepts. CLRS was highly recommended but without a technical background, I wasn't able to dive in as quickly as I hoped. A few days ago, I purchased a copy of Algorithms Unlocked [1] which was described as a "prequel" to CLRS. This review in particular grabbed my attention: "The people who will get the most out of this book are self-taught programmers who have never taken a course in algorithms but who nevertheless need to know this material." Hopefully there isn't too much overrlap :)

BTW, the crytopgraphy & information theory units [2] also look promising.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Unlocked-Thomas-H-Cormen/dp...

[2] https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science

This is awesome, as someone going through the interview process this will be my go-to for reviewing.

Also, thanks for coming to HackSC! Your talk was great and I think it really inspired a lot of people who were new to the hackathon scene.

Thanks so much! :)

I think a lot of tree code is good for practical recursive examples.

Of course, it really helps to have algebraic types and pattern matching because they more clearly expose the recursive structure of both trees and tree-based algorithms. I've also found that writing things out in a patter-matching style, case by case, really helps convey how to think recursively. Instead of trying to run a recursive algorithm in my head, having the separate cases separate makes it easier to consider them one by one.

I learned about those four sorting algorithms before ap comp sci in high school. And I know I covered them again in college at some point. Also, I remember talking about big o in the second level cs class in college. So I see them as appropriate curriculum. I am not a genius programmer that wants to figure out two algorithms cause I understand the other two so well. Show them all to me, I'll take in what I can. That being said, I am intrigued that you have a different perspective and I will check out your book to see what you have to say.

Try the development of a recursive algorithm for permutations in lexicographical order.

EDIT: added recursive to make the purpose of the suggestion clearer.

Great feedback!

I think it helps to have both the sorts there, because it gives the students another opportunity to solidify their understanding of algorithms and because they are indeed expected in things like AP CS. Personally, I find them different enough that I need to spend time on each of them to grasp them- I always have to draw algorithms out when I'm learning them, so it helped me that we had the different diagrams and visualizations for each one.

When making KA content, we have to think both about the student that's going through the content from top to bottom and the student that's "snacking" on the content, like finding it via Google search. So if you knew that a student was going to do the whole thing, you could do more just-in-time teaching - but if you didn't know, then it'd be doing a disservice to the snacker to leave out something like Big O notation, because it'd sure be strange if someone learned Theta and Omega and came away not knowing that last one existed. We did spend a while restructuring asymptotic notation in particular, that was one of the topics we debated different approaches to.

We also debated the use cases for recursion, and if we should include the classic factorial challenge. We went for it in the end, as you saw. I think recursive art is my favorite, and works well in our ProcessingJS environment, but one could argue if that's real world :-) I believe that Devin is working on another tutorial with recursion and specifically on how students can come up with their own recursive algorithm. I'll suggest the looking through directory example to him.

Yep, we are working on a quick sort visualization. I am also quite a visual learner.

The neat thing about online curriculum is that we can get feedback from all the students that use it and improve it over time. We'll probably look at all the feedback in a few months, once it's been out there for a bit, see where the dropoff points are, see what the common questions are, and use that to decide what needs changing.

These are all excellent points. As for practical example of recursion, I'd have to say anything implemented with a tree would be a good example.

I don't think we have any immediate plans for Discrete math - we are still filling in gaps in our K-12 curriculum. We'll see, maybe someday!

Descrete Math is so important to understand the analysis of the algorithms (esp. a new problem). However, I did not find any useful course except the one you mentioned.

It seems like Khan Academy initially covered whatever Sal Khan found interesting, so there is Calculus, Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. Now that it's become more focused, a side effect is that there's a bigger concentration on grade school-level stuff.

It is a pity though. It would have been great to see KA covering Theoretical CS as well as Discrete Math.

Yeah! We have full curriculum around it, as well (Intro to JavaScript, Game development, and Natural Simulations): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming

It uses a real-time JavaScript editing framework that we're in the process of open sourcing: https://github.com/Khan/live-editor

A technical talk on the editor (a bit dated at this point, but most of the points still hold) can be found here: http://ejohn.org/blog/talk-khan-academy-computer-science/