Why did we port Cormen and Balkcom's Algorithms course?

“Algorithms” by Dartmouth Computer Science professors Thomas Cormen and Devin Balkcom is an amazing course.

We love Khan Academy and this is in no way intended to challenge or discount the great work they are doing. We wanted to test Educative’s authoring platform against a well developed course. In addition, we added challenges in multiple languages.

Here are a little bit more details.

Challenges in Multiple Programming Languages

We are launching with challenges in Java, Python, C++ and obviously Javascript

If you have a favorite language that’s not covered, drop us a note. If you are willing to write the challenge stubs and test cases in your favorite language, talk to us.

Testing Educative as an Authoring Platform

We wanted to see how our relatively generic computer science widgets would work while porting a custom coded course. We did pretty well there but found a couple of areas where we were seriously lacking. One thing that we realized early on was that multiple choice quizzes on Educative are primitive and so that’s one area where we have room to improve.

How long did it take?

If you are curious, it took us about a week to port this course. Overall, it has been a good fun experience. Most of the time was spent in re-creating animations (of course).

How can I contribute?

We are committed to improving this. If you're interested in contributing or have any feedback/suggestion/criticism, drop us a note at hello@educative.io

* An earlier version of this article didn't mention Prof. Devin Balkcom's name in the title. We appologize for that and have fixed the title.