How to Use This Course: Encouragement and Coaching

To get you immersed into quantum computing as smoothly as possible, we have broken up our story into chapters and the chapters into lessons to provide a gradual introduction to new information and concepts. Along the way, we suggest various questions to encourage you to reflect on what you are learning and to examine the details that are important in understanding the concepts. By doing those questions, you will build your ability to think “quantumly” and you will increase your confidence that you can tackle cutting-edge concepts in quantum information science.

Both Alice and I believe that you can master all parts of this course because we firmly believe that the human mind is a “muscle” that can become stronger with exercise. Your abilities, both mental and physical, are not fixed but can grow over time. But we also recognize what you have all experienced: learning requires effort, practice, and coaching. Just think of what you went through to learn to speak, read, and understand your native language. But you persisted and with help from your family, friends, and teachers you now do those things naturally and usually without much effort. We have written this course to help direct your QC and QIS efforts in productive ways, to provide you with practice, and some coaching. QC and QIS, like all fields of human knowledge, have a new vocabulary unfamiliar to beginners, new concepts, and new ways of thinking about and reasoning with those concepts. We urge you to work with friends as you learn about QC and QIS to coach and to encourage each other when things seem difficult.