Hello there, and welcome to part 3 of Excel VBA, for creative problem solving. My name is Charlie Nudelman, and I'll be your instructor for this course, just as I was for parts 1 and 2. So, I wanted to kind of give you an overview, of part three. Part 3 is a project based course, and you're going to be working on several fairly open ended problems. I give you some direction but you're welcome to solve these, any way you want, as long as you are satisfying the constraints of each of the projects. So, the course website looks something like this, and I've got some introductory material in week one, is this course for you, for Mac users, just like I did for part 1 and 2. I've got this unlock quiz, so the course material is only available to subscribers, that's something that is pretty consistent with Coursera courses. So, if you unlock the quiz, you can get the course files, and then you can go ahead and start on the projects. The projects course is going to be a little bit different from parts one and two. Parts 1 and 2, really focused on kind of the base of this pyramid, and some you might be familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy, is sort of a kind of model for learning, when you're beginning learning something you just remember, understand, so, that is kind of the first part, of part one of the course, and then you got into the latter parts of part 1, and you started to apply, and analyze, and evaluate things, and then part 2, kind of continue to kind of along the same thing with different topics. But now in part 3, you're really going to be focused on creating new work. You're going to be creating things from scratch, basically things that didn't exist. You are creating the solutions to open ended projects. In so doing, you're really going to take everything you've learned so far and combine it into a real world solution. My philosophy on learning is, in order for you to really understand something, you have got to create, and practice, and synthesize your own solution. So, in this course you're going to have three different projects. The first project, is an easy project, you're going to have the choice of two options. The first one, is a Currency Converter project, and the second, is a geography toolbox. The Currency Converter project is a real time Currency Converter. It will obtain up to the minute information from the web, and it'll present this information in a nice user form, and the user can easily convert between different types of currency. The second of the easy projects is a geography tool box, that will enable the user to calculate the straight line distances between different cities in the United States. The second project, like the first project, you have two projects to choose from. The second project is an intermediate project. The ultimate organizer is more of a spreadsheet based tool, that will enable you to add columns, and rows, to a spreadsheet, so this can be extrapolated and applied to a lot of different scenarios in a lot of different fields. So, the Ultimate Organizer is perhaps the most generic of all of these projects. If you're math oriented, and you really like challenges like statistics, even though it's not that difficult the Regression Toolbox is mathematical in nature, you'll learn a lot about statistics, and how regression analysis are performed. The third project, is intermediate in difficulty, and every learner must complete it. It is a Monte Carlo simulation, of a cash flow of a profitability analysis. Then if you wish, if you'd like the honors distinction on your course certificate, you can complete the Grade Manager project, which is quite challenging. So, if you're really looking for a challenge, then you can try to tackle the Grade Manager project. Part 3, The Projects course is quite different from parts 1 and 2, you don't have weekly assignments, or weekly quizzes, instead all you have are these three projects. So, I've got, sort of the information here, the easy projects there are screencast that you can watch, for each of the projects, I've got some hints, but ultimately, these are quite open ended. Feel free to do whatever you want, as long as you are satisfying the constraints of the problem. So for example, if I open up the problem statement here, it tells you kind of the requirements, and the grading rubric. When you submit your project, you're going to have peers review and grade your project, and on the flip side of that coin, you in order to get a grade on each project, are going to have to grade others projects, so you can kind of peruse the different projects here. During week two, you will complete an intermediate project. Same thing you've got peer review, you're going to submit it here, there's requirements for each of the projects. Then week three, is the Monte Carlo simulation as required of all learners. And then if you want, you can do the challenging Grade Manager project for honors. Just as with parts 1 and 2 of the course, feel free to chime in on these discussion forums, create new forums and add hints, ask questions of other learners, and I'd really like to encourage a collaborative environment. So, please feel free to share ideas, give each other hints, help each other out, and so on. Due to the large scale nature of these online courses, it's really going to be difficult for me as the instructor to get involved with all of your projects. That's why I'm trying to give you so many hints and suggestions in these screencast. But you can always obtain suggestions and help from other learners, so please feel free to chime in on these discussion forums. With that I'd like to wish you all the best of luck, and hope you guys have fun with this, and I hope you learn a lot. Good luck and thanks for joining me in part 3.
