While the material itself is important and very useful in general, the course, unfortunately, doesn't have enough practical material to help students to internalise it.

Some explanation are unclear or confusing.

Interesting but needs MUCH better instruction. I'm sure the people teaching this really know their stuff but the students need to be able to understand it. Not even considering the heavy accents making the instructors hard to understand at some times, the instructors are just not good teachers. In order for someone to be a good instructor they have to know the content AND be able to explain the content so that someone without knowledge of the content can easily follow and understand. I felt like most of what they said was reading or paraphrasing power point slides and this course seemed more like a 'review' course for someone who had already been taught the concepts previously. Many times the course flow seemed unorganized as well. Having to program was also a problem when the course was not supposed to have prerequisites as a 'beginner' course. I want to take more courses in this specialization but am worried to do so since these guys teach the other classes as I'm sure the instruction will be pretty bad as well but further complicated by more difficult concepts.

The course is taught by 3 instructors. This makes the experience strikingly unbalanced. The style of course delivery and explanation is very poor with one of the instructors, the one who took Week 1 and 6. The rest of the weeks were OK. The other two instructors were clear with their arguments. This course has a very different approach (do-it-yourself-before-expalnation-by-instructors), although it was mentioned clearly on the Course Info page. If you can make out yourself what strategy to apply for the interactive puzzles, then you are doing good. Otherwise, the puzzles will just be trial-and-error games for you. The instructors were kind enough to answer on the Discussion Forum, but do not expect much activity from your fellow learners as there might be very few people taking this course with you.

I will try to be objective here. I really liked the puzzles. They are very well implemented and help with understanding of the material. But this is the only thing I liked about the course. These puzzles really make up for the poor quality of the professors. Michael Levin and Alexander Shen possess an amazing quality to make even 2 minute videos simply unbearable. If you want to experience a real Soviet school style, you should definitely try try this course. Both explanations and assignments are very poorly formulated. The professors simply show you the slides and read the text from it. This is by far the worst course I took on Coursera.

Do not be deceived by the "Beginner" status tag associated with this course. It very much expects you to be familiar with the subject matter, as certain logical steps are left out (whether purposefully or not), only to show up during the graded quiz at the end of the week. This leads to scouring the web for greater clarification and better examples of the subject being covered, completely defeating the purpose of paying money to have said information provided to the student.

The lectures are bad and boring, which is a shame considering how engaging and intriguing this subject can be. Omission of certain subject material that then shows up on the quiz results in randomly selecting an answer, checking if it is incorrect, then retaking the quiz in a cycle of "process of elimination", until a passing grade is achieved. I did this:

1.) To see if the explanations after getting the question correct (why a more robust explanation is provided after getting the question right as opposed to wrong, I'll never understand) provided any insights. They did not. They were as vague and confusing as the videos they were supposedly based off of.

2.) Just to move on with the curriculum. It gets tiring looking at the same explanations and videos over and over, only to have nothing "click" in your head.

I'm on the third week of this course (Recursion & Induction), and I'm surprised I've made it this far. I have since canceled my subscription, and have opted for a more exhaustive medium (https://smile.amazon.com/Introductory-Discrete-Mathematics-Computer-Science/dp/0486691152/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3O9JR43XF4VF0&dchild=1&keywords=introduction+to+discrete+mathematics&qid=1609175879&sprefix=introduction+to+discrete%2Caps%2C475&sr=8-1) to help me on my journey to understand this subject.

Save yourself the time, energy, and money. Look elsewhere for a more "Beginner-friendly" format.

The worst course I have ever taken. Concepts have been explained very poorly. Please please don't waste time on learning this course.

I'd like to unenroll, but coursera does not show an option to do so!

I want to unenroll

Overall, I think the course has a good content and lots of inspiring material, from which I learned a lot. It lives up to its name and taught me a lot of mathematical thinking in CS. The discussion forum is also helpful. The staff is responsive.

But some courses, especially in week 4 and 5, could be explained better. For some programming quiz, the robot grader lacks the flexibility to recognize the correct solution that achieves the same purpose but presents in a slightly different format. Sometimes, the problem statement should be clarified better.

Lot's of fun challenging puzzles and things to think about. Had a lot of fun. Learned interesting techniques like induction, double counting, and backtracking -- which controls the combinatorial explosion of non-polynomial problems. The final bonus problem is really challenging and a great joy to solve. Don't give up even if you're not really a natural math person like me. You will find value here. Generally, this course, like my other favourites, is about how to think about things when you don't know the formula.

This course teaches about methods of proof used in mathematics. But it would be a disservice to say that is all that this course is about. It is much more than that. It lets you glimpse at the beauty hidden behind mathematics. For me the highlight of the course is the suite of interactive tools that motivate the techniques about to be taught. If you are taking the course please make sure you play with these tools and try to solve the problems before you watch the relevant lectures.

Really nice material. There are lots os exercises and quizzes throughout the course, it was a very different experience compared to other courses I did in Coursera because the professors include questions as if you were in the classroom, like "Do you see what I mean with this?" or "Can you solve the problem now?", which makes you think again and pay more attention. Going to the 2nd module now!

Dear Teachers,

Firstly, I would like to tell you about that I greatly respect and admire to our teachers.

Although I'm not a programmer, I'm very interested in programming languages and computer science. Thus, I took this course.

I like the whole course.

Thanks, a lot to our Teachers, teaching staffs, and all other.

I do thank.

It was really very important of a computer Science student to learn Discrete Mathematics. This course is really meant for such thing that why mathematics(Discrete mathematics) is important. Teachers are best, they help if anyone asks them their doubts. Its a great platform where you learn new things things which are very helpful. I thank all the teachers here who taught us.

Great experience!

My special thanks to professor Alexander S. Kulikov, Michael Levin and, Vladimir Podolskii for their great works. Besides, I am really grateful to the University of California San Diego & National Research University Higher School of Economics and Yandex.

Confidently, I would like to say "COURSERA" is the best!

Excellent course, presented in a very didactic way by combining theory and practice. It is not a collection of exposed knowledge to memorize, but rather a series of challenges of varying difficulty: some easy and others that almost make your head explode. I loved.

It was just awesome. Honestly, I've not taken this good course till now. It was easy, entertaining, surprising, shocking, advanced, cool all at the same time. Thank you UC San Diego, NR HSE and Coursera for providing such an amazing Stuff.

So much fun using mathematics and it's basic to learn a bit of computer science!. The quiz is really challenging but, you can still solve it with a bit of practice. The lecture is enough but the concept and the assignments were very neat.

Puzzles are great and its is fun learning the course but the problem is with the programming assignments. they are bit annoying. Even using programming in the video lecture its hard to find the relation b/w programming and mathematics.

It was great in terms of everything. But, I didn't like the thing that some assignments support the only python. They should include C++ and java also... Struggled in coding python just that's it. But it was great overall.

The course provides useful knowledge to improve mathematical thinking. I have learnt a lot from the course. The programming exercises are interesting and motivate me to apply what I have learnt into solving problems.

Great intuitive problems and introduction to mathematics, the course bridges these then well to small programming challenges. I would highly recommend this to annyone interested in becoming a better programmer!

This is one of the best courses I've been into! Anyone looking forward for a breakthrough in their career of computer science or maths should really check this course out! The teaching staff were great too!

Great course that asks questions as you go along, my only issue is that for some parts of the course, a lot of content is covered and not all aspects have a question to ensure you actually understand it.