Let’s be truly open.

Today, I saw in my google reader that Standford is offering its iPhone development class for free on iTunesU. Anyone can log on, follow along with the class, and learn how to program for free! So I logged on to iTunes, and found that many other colleges also offer their classes free.

I can take a Java class at Cornell, or a Machine learning class at MIT. The professors upload the homework assignments that they hand out in class, so the people following at home can do them. While you might not get “college credit” for the class, you get valuable knowledge from great professors.

Here is my challenge to the College of Charleston and the Computer Science department specifically. Step up with the big boys like MIT, Stanford, and Duke. Before I graduate in 2010, I would love to see a College of Charleston Computer Science class offered for free on iTunes. I believe we have great professors at CofC, so let’s show them to the world.

ProjectEuler.net

For those of you who have never stumbled on this site before, it just contains math problems that you need a computer to solve. I’ve been working myself on doing some of these problems in python, though they can be done in any language.

Right now there are ~250 problems up on the site, and as I was thinking it would be a cool idea to get some people together to go at some of these problems. Maybe even submit answers to all 250?

Here is an example of the 1st problem:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

.. and my code in Python to solve it:

total = 0;
for i in range(0,1000):
    if ((i%3 ==0) or (i%5 ==0)):
        total = total + i;
print total;

At any rate — I’ve solved the first 10 & #215. They are a lot of fun, so check it out! If you wanted to look at any of the code for mine, just drop me a line @ bvgiarro@edisto.cofc.edu or comment on this post.

Link: [ProjectEuler.net]

-Brian Giarrocco