David Kosbie and Mark Stehlik are two of our most celebrated teachers, and the course creation has extensively involved veteran TAs from our intro undergrad courses. This is not a random unsupported student project.
It's still not the curriculum that CMU teaches its students. Self-studying through it will not give the learner anything remotely similar to the knowledge a CMU student majoring in CS gets.
For ambitious autodidacts hoping to do something like Scott Young's MIT challenge, this is crucial information to have.
no, of course it's not, it's targeted to high school students, which is very clearly stated in the page: "WHO IS IT FOR? 8th + 9th grade [...]".
It's designed to be a high school curriculum that doesn't suck. Many US high schools do an incredibly poor job of teaching computer science, if they even try at all.
Now, that said, the AP part of it is based upon our intro course, 15-112, and if you take the full year of it through CS academy, you're getting a big chunk of what we teach our students in one (often first-semester) course - and we'll give you CMU course credit for it. But that's a first-year course that's designed to prepare you for the rest of the CS curriculum, not .. what we teach you in the other 7.5 semesters.
(In case it's not obvious, I'm a CS professor at CMU. I've taught the course I'm discussing above, 15-112, together with David Kosbie, one of the creators of CS academy.)
