Materials for MIT 6.S083 / 18.S190: Computational thinking with Julia + application to the COVID-19 pandemic

6.S083 / 18.S190 - Introduction to Computational Thinking with Julia, with applications to modelling the COVID-19 pandemic

Spring 2020

Welcome to 6.S083 / 18.S190 (doubly listed)! This is an introductory course on Computational Thinking, using the Julia programming language, with applications to modelling the COVID-19 epidemic. It is being taught at MIT in the 2nd half of the spring 2020 semester.

Videos

• Welcome!

• Lectures

Please help edit the automatically-generated subtitles in the lecture transcripts! If you do so, please add punctuation, and please change the colour of the part you edited to a colour other than black, and different from the previous and next sections.

Professors

Visiting Professor David P. Sanders (sandersd@mit.edu) & Professor Alan Edelman

Logistics

MW 3 - 4.30, online. (Registered students will receive a Zoom link.)

Lectures will be mostly live at the above times, with recordings posted when available. There will be some pre-recorded snippets.

Start date: March 30, 2020.

Office hours TBD

Discussion forum

Piazza

Installation of Julia

You will need to install Julia, and various packages by carefully following the detailed instructions here. (Note that you do not need to separately install the Jupyter notebook – it will be installed for you as part of the installation process. It is possible to use a pre-existing installation, but we recommend against it. This will install a new, separate copy of it.)

Office hours

TBD

Evaluation

• 5 problem sets, lowest score dropped. 25% for each of the other 4 problem sets.

• Released on Tuesday and due the following Tuesday until May 5.

• To pass, you must submit at least 4 problem sets with passing grades

• No final exam

Problem sets consist of coding and will be submitted online.

Windows users

If you use Windows, please download Git for Windows here

Getting the files

To get the files, use git from the command line (or from a GUI), as follows

• Clone the repository once with

git clone https://github.com/mitmath/6S083

This will create a new directory called 6S083 with the matierials.

• Update it to pull in new changes

git pull

This needs to be executed from within the directory. (Use cd to change directory.)

Syllabus

See here for the course syllabus and schedule.