Spring '22 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Edited Transcript

Hello, and welcome to CC 410. My name is Russ Feldhausen. And I’ll be your instructor this semester, I’m going to try and do weekly announcements videos like this about once a week or maybe once every other week, just to give you some updates about what’s going on in the class. These videos are unscripted, they’re not going to be nearly as produced as the rest of the videos in the class. It’s really just a chance for me to talk to talk through things that are on my mind and answer any questions that I’ve had throughout the week.

So CC 410 is kind of a new course, and I am updating it quite a bit this semester. Some things that I’m doing are updating the assignments for the milestones to be a little bit newer, I’m also moving the textbook content outside of Codio. So you’ll have free access to the textbook and all the quizzes, we’re also adding a couple of concept quizzes based on some of the stuff that’s been done in CIS 400 by Nathan Bean. So that will be something new this semester. I may also rework some of the examples in this course. So the short thing is things may change a little bit. And things definitely have changed from last semester. And because of that, you may run into little issues where links on Canvas aren’t working or something is missing, or there are typos or something didn’t carry over correctly. So if you run across anything that looks wrong, please let me know feedback is always welcome. And you can earn some of those bug bounty extra credit points for helping me find and squash all of these little bugs that come from reformatting this course.

So in this course, the big picture is to get you a lot of experience learning different types of programming. So in this course, we’re going to cover object oriented programming pretty deeply, we’re going to talk about how to build graphical user interfaces for our programs. And we’re going to dive a little bit into web interfaces for our programs. This course is built a lot around examples, the each milestone will come along with at least one big example, maybe two or three big examples that I walk through step by step, so that you can follow along and make sure you’re able to do them. And then throughout the semester, we’re going to work on several milestones for this restaurant point of sale project, I think it’s a really great way to learn how to build these big projects is to build one single project iteratively throughout the course instead of a bunch of little projects like we’ve done in previous courses.

And then you’ll also be able to take that experience and adapt it into a final project. One big thing I want you to keep in mind is your final project in this course, should be about 1/4 of the size of the restaurant project. And so as we’re going through the semester, you’ll see how big the restaurant project is, I think the final version that I have, that’s my model solution is around eight to 10,000 lines of code. So your final project is going to be in the range of two to 3000 lines of code is what we’re shooting for.

This class is going to introduce a lot of new technologies that you may not have used before. For example, we’re going to use Git and GitHub classroom to track our code and also to submit assignments will work with tools such as Gradle, and tox to automate a lot of our development and our compilation and unit testing. We’re going to introduce type checking in Python, Java, we already have type checking in the compiler, but you may not have really understood what it’s doing. So we’re going to talk about type checking, we’ll talk about unit testing, we’re going to use a style checker to actually check our code and make sure it follows a commonly accepted style. And we’re going to learn how to add documentation to our code and actually generate user documentation based on the comments we leave in our code. It’s lots of great things that will be very useful for you as you go forward this semester. So, like I said, the final project, you get to choose the topic, I want you to align it with your interests. So whatever you’re looking at doing outside of this course, this course is mainly for non computer science majors. So you’re either in the integrated computer science program where you’ve got a secondary focus, or you’re taking this as part of the computer science certificate. So it might be your actual major that you’re aligning this with. But the idea is to use the new skills that you develop in this class to build something of your own, you get to work with me iteratively throughout the semester, so you and I will discuss project topics and scope. And then you’ll have four milestone check ins with me to see how things are going. And then at the end of the semester, you get to present your work, hopefully, we’ll have be able to actually present it to the entire class, I’m hoping that we can get that figured out by the end of this semester.

So we’re launching in the week one of this course week one is pretty simple. It’s a lot of just the administrative stuff that goes at the beginning of the course. But the interesting thing that you work on is this project that I call Hello Real World. It’s a reimagining of the classic Hello World program, but done the way like you would see in a professional development shop. So it’s real world with unit testing and documentation and all sorts of things that are really important to keep in mind when you’re writing code. It’s not a simple three line program anymore. It’s going to be several different pieces all put together. This week, you’ll also be able to schedule your first final project meeting where I can discuss a little bit more about the final project with you one on one, answer any questions, maybe brainstorm some ideas for Project topics that you can keep in mind.

Also, as you’re going through this, please pay attention to my office hours. Since this is an online course I don’t hold any formal office hours. but you can always schedule a time with me on Calendly and I can meet with you one on one via zoom. There’s also a couple of different ways you can communicate with me there’s the cc410-help email address, which if you email me, please use that email address. I’m also on Discord and you’ll have a little assignment to introduce yourself on the discord server and ask me any questions you want to ask. If I’m at my computer, I’m probably on Discord, you might get pretty quick responses on Discord. If you post something on Discord and I don’t respond within an hour, so feel free to email it to me as well. I will guarantee responses from emails, definitely.

So after week one, we launch into week two, you’ll start working on a class library for an object oriented programming project. This is the first restaurant milestone it’s also one of the biggest restaurant milestones. My model solution for this milestone is around 2000 to 2500 lines of code depending on how you measure it. Thankfully, it’s mostly boilerplate. Once you get one project done, the others are pretty easy to do as well. So feel free to work on that. The big thing I can tell you about Week two is be a little thoughtful about how you’re putting your code together, and you should be able to make it work. This is Maggie, Maggie is one of our pets here. She’s a mini– mini poodle. So you’ll see Maggie and Reggie throughout this course they like to have attention whenever they hear me talking on the computer.

So after week two, we have week three, week three is unit testing and documentation, we’re going to add a lot of stuff to your restaurant milestones. So that’s something you get to see my model solution for the first semester in this course had 423 unit tests in it. Many of them were repeats this semester, I have scoped back this a little bit. So you’ll probably be in the three to 400 unit test range. But it’s really important to catch errors. When I wrote all these unit tests, I actually caught about a half dozen errors in my own code for the first milestone. So it is a really useful task.

Beyond that, we’ll launch into things on inheritance and polymorphism and some more advanced object oriented programming topics, it’s really a chance for you to refactor your old code and add some more structure to it. And so that will be due by the end of February. Once we get past that, then we’ll go into graphical user interfaces working with external libraries, the web serialization, all these other interesting topics that we’ll learn throughout the semester.

So, CC 410 is a four credit hour course, which means that it requires around eight to 12 hours each week of your time. So if you think about it, this is basically about a third of a full time job, just in this course. And I can tell you based on prior data that I have from other students, that that seems to be about right. Most students seem to spend around eight to 12 hours on this course each week, especially when they’re working on the first few milestones of the restaurant project. So I encourage you to schedule your time wisely. Look at your schedule, make sure you have that many hours to given your week. And make sure you plan ahead to make those hours available. And also on these milestones. Make sure you start early and ask questions. It’s not enough to do these milestones over a weekend and then get stuck and ask me questions on Monday. Because by then it might be too late to actually get a response. So make sure you start early, ask questions, get feedback early. If you’re not sure you’re going in the right direction, it’s much much easier to ask questions before you’ve written 1000 lines of code, then after you’ve written 1000 lines of code, and then you have to redo it.

When you’re copy pasting code, please copy paste carefully. There will be a lot of instances where you can reuse bits of code between the files. So make sure you’re careful and getting all of those edits made. This semester, you get to use the tool Git to keep track of your code, please commit to Git frequently I don’t want to hear from students that you deleted your code and lost it because you weren’t committing to Git. So anytime you get something working, you should probably commit to Git and then do git push. So that’s on GitHub, you can always do that I show you how to do it in the Hello Real World project. So make sure you make use of that. And then finally, in this course, you can use and you can cite online resources, there’s a lot of opportunities where we’re going to ask you to do something that you may not be comfortable doing or may not exactly know how to do in programming, but you can go look up a resource that will explain to you how to do it. If you do that, please make sure you cite where you get those sources from. And also bear in mind that you’re not actually bypassing the point of the project. I don’t mind if you look at an online resource to figure out how to sort an array. I’m not trying to teach you how to do that. But if you’re looking at an online resource for how to build an entire interface in Java, you probably should reference the textbook first because that’s really the point of what we’re trying to teach.

So beyond that, please feel free to keep in touch throughout the semester. I’m always on Discord. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me. We also host tea time office hours in our department, those are Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. There’ll be available via zoom or discord. We’ll kind of change it up throughout the semester. The Tuesdays will also be available in person once we get past this COVID wave so watch information about that if you’re on campus or near campus, you might be able to hang out with us Tuesdays at 330 on campus as well.

So that’s all I’ve got for this first week of announcements. I’m really looking forward to this class this semester. I hope you are as well. I’m here to help. If you have any questions, concerns need anything with this course please let me know. You might even get to see Maggie on Zoom if you connect with me, but good luck this semester, and I hope to hear from you soon.