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MIT Missing Semester 2026

90 points by vismit2000

by ghaff

5 subcomments

There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own.
I did take one of the MIT intro CS MOOCs at one point for kicks. Very good. But it was more or less learn Python on your own if you don't already know it (or how to program more broadly). That doesn't really happen in a lot of other disciplines other than some areas of the arts.

by ternus

5 subcomments

It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.

by alexpotato

0 subcomment

I was an undergrad at Rutgers in the late 1990s as they transitioned from teaching Pascal to Java for the introductory CS classes.
The lectures were primarily about algorithms, basic data structures etc and the extra "labs", taught by Teaching Assistants, was almost always for reviewing the lecture notes with a focus on answering questions.
At no point was there any discussion around "hey, here is a good way to design, write and test a program in a compiled language". My prior experience was with BASIC so just figuring out how to compile a program was a skill to pick up. I thankfully picked it up quickly but others struggled.
Another thing I saw often was people writing ENTIRE programs and then trying to compile them and getting "you have 500 compilation errors". I never wrote programs this way, I was more "write a couple lines, compile, see what happens etc" but it always struck me that even just suggesting that option in class would have helped a lot of folks.
(This being HN, I'm sure some people will say that students figuring this stuff out on their own helps weed out non-serious people but I still don't 100% buy that argument)

by russfink

0 subcomment

Link to the About page that clearly describes the effort and rationale.
https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/

by loughnane

1 subcomments

Anyone know how/if this differs from the 2020 one?
Edit: Nvm, they comment on it. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/

by anonu

1 subcomments

I always thought this practical side of development was missing in a CS or engineering curriculum. This is awesome.
For similar reasons I think arts and humanities students should take marketing and business courses.

by musicale

0 subcomment

This looks like it is part of MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP)?
Which seems like a brilliant idea (part of their 4-1-4 academic calendar.)
https://elo.mit.edu/iap/

by kratom_sandwich

0 subcomment

Awesome course and I encourage everyone to check out the previous iteration (and the corresponding discussions on HN)

by tekknolagi

0 subcomment

by LasEspuelas

0 subcomment

There should be something like this available for any student at University, regardless of field. Perhaps less geared towards programming tasks but basic computing productivity.

by genix

0 subcomment

very useful, took me couple months brute forcing to grasp the know hows because my school doesn't teach it. glad to see a course for it now getting out there

by kkfx

0 subcomment

Basic FLOSS desktop knowledge must be in high schools for everyone, you can't study in the modern time without contemporary tools. LaTeX must also be in the game, because we need people who know how to express themselves crafting good quality documents.

by russfink

2 subcomments

Conspicuously missing is a direct mention of AI tools. Is MIT, like others, side-stepping the use of AI by students to (help them) complete homework assignments and projects?