CS 201: Intro Assignment

Getting started

Initial survey form

Fill out this survey form. Thanks!

What to turn in: Make sure you submit your responses to the above form.

Logging into a department computer

Stop by CMC 306 or CMC 304 to verify that we've correctly set up an account for you on the department Macs. Our setup in the CS department is a little different than elsewhere on campus, so even if you've logged into other machines elsewhere on campus, double check and make sure you can log into our department machines. If you have any problems, see our department system administrator Mike Tie in CMC 305 who will be happy to get you going.

What to turn in: In the submission box in Moodle for this assignment, tell me that you've successfully started the virtual machine saying something like "I have successfully logged into a department lab computer."

Setting up your own computer

If you wish to be using your own computer for some of the assignments, you'll need to set it up. There are two choices: you can install Java to run natively on your own operating system, or you can install a Linux virtual machine with all of the software installed. There are links on the course home page that point to directions for either option. If you want to do this, get one of these working, and ask for help if you need it. Mike Tie in CMC 305 is great at helping people figure out installation challenges.

What to turn in: In the submission box in Moodle for this assignment, tell me either "I have successfully gotten Java installed on my computer," or "I do not intend to use a personally owned computer for any work for this class ."

Piazza

We'll be using Piazza, which is a site for managing student questions and answers within a course. If you've got a question about an assignment or content in the class, send it to the course Piazza site; it has a really cool wiki-like system for allowing students (and me) to answer questions. I've used it many times, and it works great. You should feel free to answer questions as you can to help other people; it's lots of fun.

You'll need to enroll for Piazza. To do do, visit the course Moodle page, and click on "Piazza Questions and Answers." Once you get to Piazza, you'll see a question I've posed, for which you need to contribute towards the answer. Piazza is designed so that all students collaboratively edit a single answer, so you don't need to just add your content to the bottom; you might tweak what someone else has said in some way.

All questions about course content, assignments, and so on should go to Piazza. If you email me directly, I'll gently ask you to post to Piazza instead. Of course, you can always talk to me in person during office hours, and any communication of a personal nature (grades, etc) is welcome by email as well.

What to turn in: Contribute to the answer to the Piazza question I posed.

Department newsletter

The Carleton Sentinel is our departmental email newsletter. It contains news about job opportunities in computer science, courses you may want to take, departmental events, and whatever else we think may be relevant. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe! It's a great way to see how many opportunities are offered to computer science students. Visit the the email list home page, click Subscribe, and enter your email address. Make sure that you aren't using some fancy spam filtering mechanism in your email system that looks for brackets in the subject line: you'll miss both this newsletter and course emails.