The first issue is finding the lecture videos, which are no longer available on coursera. After extensive searching, I found the entire playlist on the internet archive here.
Next I had trouble downloading SPIM, a MIPS assembly simulator (basically I guess a virtual machine). First I accidentally got the GUI version, but later downloaded a command line usable version for mac with brew install SPIM
To run a file rather then jumping into the interactive version I had to use spim -file spim_hello_world.s.