Prof Pettit is a great professor and person! He tries to make the class as interesting as possible by cracking dad jokes and is always available to answer questions/listen to your concerns. This class was significantly more difficult than I thought it would be, though. As someone who went into the class with minimal, if any, programming knowledge, I had to spend a significant amount of time outside of class understanding and completing the weekly programming assignments. The 2 midterms + final are EXTREMELY difficult as you have to code on paper, but the class as a whole is graded very fairly (weekly programming assignments are worth 35% of your grade and all 3 exams together are worth 25%).

This class is a great introduction to Python. I have three lessons that I learned after taking this class: 1. The exams (2 midterms and a final) are terribly designed and terribly written. You have to handwrite code and evaluate code that in no way judges your own programming capability. So, study the nitty-gritty things like value types, the nuances of loops, and other fundamentals of Python before the exam. Regardless of how well you think you understand Python, your ability to do the assignments or the labs is NOT an indicator of your success on the exams. 2. Do not prioritize a professor or a time slot; all the recordings are posted online! You can watch them anytime in high quality and at 1.5x speed. Professor Pettit's recordings are particularly stellar. 3. I should not have to say this, but do not share code or collaborate with others on assignments. It is not from my own personal experience, but from hearing the stories of others who were caught. Each person's program is unique in style and format. So, it is very easy to spot unusual similarities. It is never worth it to cheat, especially at UVA with the honor code. Please, please, please do your own honest work because many of those who did not were caught.

This is a really great course for those who want to get into programming but have little to no background knowledge in it. The course begins at the barest of basics, but by the end, you'll have all the skills you need to program a game as advanced as Pac-Man or the original Mario. There are weekly programming assignments that range from do-in-your-sleep easy to tear-your-hair-out complex. The exams were notably difficult as you have to program on paper, so there's no trial and error that using an IDE would allow you to. Labs were probably the worst part of the class. They were graded on attendance, but the actual programming you had to do was unnecessarily difficult and awkward as you have to do it with another partner. I didn't take much away from the labs, but the actual classes taught by Pettit were helpful.

Professor Pettit is a great and nice professor that genuinely cares for what he teaches. He explains the core concepts very well and I went from knowing virtually nothing about coding to creating a whole video game by the end of the semester. He also has a certain charm that makes lectures pretty enjoyable, even though you don't really need to go as he posts the recordings online. While some of the exams were somewhat difficult, as long as you do the PA's, you should be able to get an A in the class. They also give you extra credit if you submit the PA 48 hours before it is due (they post it a week before its due), which is a bonus. The one thing I will say is that the labs were very awkward. Most of the work is done in partners, which ends up usually with one person doing all the work and the other being completely lost as there's not a very concise way to have two people work on the same code together. They felt like the labs were always either super helpful or a waste of time.

By far one of my favorite professors at UVA. I have never taken a CS course before and he made the class so enjoyable and now Im thinking of minoring in CS. Raymond and the TAs were very helpful with all of the assignments and always brought a lot of energy to class and seemed to really enjoy the content they taught. I always got grades back for assignments and exams within 2 days of ocmpletion. I really recommend this class to anyone who is interested in learning more about CS.

#tCFspring2021 If you have any experience coding please take the placement exam before enrolling. For me, I missed the deadline to sign up for the placement so I kind of wasted my time taking this class since I already knew most of the material. Either way, the class is what you would expect from an intro to CS class, you watch lectures, do lab work, and have programming assignments (& tests&quizzes but they are very easy). For my semester the professors teach together in their lectures and they were asynchronous, which was very nice.

#tCFspring2021 This class was fun and taught me how to code thoroughly. I received an A+ and I think if you put in work you if you put in work you will get an easy A. the professors were nice and friendly. I sometimes went to the live lectures. I don't know anyone who watched the recorded asynchronous lectures by Dill. The final project wasn't hard and exams were stretched for time but not too difficult. My main complaint about this course is office hours. You would have to wait up to an hour to speak to a TA in office hours, and they often wouldn't know how to help you if you had a problem that wasn't standard. Additionally, Labs were so bad. It is hard to code with a partner and we were required to have a partner during lab. It made learning much more difficult and not enjoyable. Especially since there was usually an imbalance of knowledge (one knew more about code and was teaching the other). Homeworks were not hard.

Highly recommend taking this course with Prof. Pettit even if you have just the slightest interest in learning some coding. There is a bit of a steep learning curve at the start (esp. if you have zero prior coding experience), but coding is kind of fun once you get a feel for how it works. Definitely start early on the PA homework assignments so that you have time to get help in office hours, which I also highly suggest going to. I took this course online during the summer, so he switched up how testing works compared to his in-person classes. Our 'tests' were verbal 'walkthroughs,' where you talk out the logic behind some of your PAs & the TA asks you some questions. Pretty chill and much easier than his normal in-person paper/pencil exams. Most people get an A or A- as long as stuff is turned in on time.

I took this class over the summer and loved it. The lectures are long and time consuming but helpful for the homework. The PAs take a while so do not leave them for the last minute and be sure to use office hours!

I took this class to see if CS was a thing I could pursue in the future as a career (I'm currently pre-med majoring in bio), and after taking this class, I am 100% sure that I will not be pursuing CS ever again. Nothing was wrong with lecture or the professor, I just hated it. CS is a very important skill to learn and I'm glad I took it for the experience, but this is the first and last cs class I'm ever taking. It is like learning a new language and solving a very hard puzzle. Pettit was a good prof to have and cracks dad jokes all the time, making class more enjoyable, but even then, half the class never goes to lecture (everything is recorded and posted).