CS-6795 - Introduction to Cognitive Science
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Reviews
I loved this class. I really enjoyed the material. It’s similar to HCI, but much more on the human side – investigating “How does mind work”.
It’s almost entirely reading and writing. A lot of reading. Little to no coding, depends on your term project team size. There are 6 individual exercises (they started as group assignments until students/TAs realized how unrealistic that was in an online course), 2 group projects (with the same group, it’s a 2 part project), and a term project with groups of 3-5.
The term project is very open ended. They seed a list of fields at the beginning and you form a group based on the topic that is most interesting to you. The amount of work scales to the group size. 3 people is a lit review, 4 requires some sort of experiment, 5 requires coding. So you could easily get away without doing any coding – even in a 5 person team, not everyone will need to code.
There are weekly quizzes, open book no time limit. No exams.
Overall, if you liked KBAI or HCI, you’ll like this class too!
YMMV - since this was a pilot semester, things could change in the next offering. The teaching staff was very receptive to feedback, such as the early switch to individual exercises. The other review for this class must have been written before the course staff made the change. There is certainly an emphasis on group work (Cognition is best studied in that environment), but it was doable, in my opinion. I recommend this course.
Class is not over yet but I came here to express my disappointment that they decided to scale the class by turning projects into group projects instead of limiting enrollment until they could hire more TAs.
The group projects are not big enough for the number of people assigned to them. Because this is OMSCS, many of us work full time, are parents, and live in different time zones, so coordinating on group projects adds a lot of overhead for little learning reward. Working in a group also limits your ability to do self-directed work as you are limited by what your classmates want to do or are willing to commit time to (and as discussed previously, everyone has different constraints on their time). I was hoping the class would run more like one of Joyner’s EdTech or HCI courses: lots of reading, lots of research, high expectations, but self-directed.
The only reason I didn’t drop this class immediately is because I’m close to graduating and was otherwise looking forward to the class material.
If the class is going to continue relying on group projects to scale enrollment I cannot recommend it.