Fall '26 Week 1
Resources
Edited Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CC410 in fall 2026. My name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this program. Uh, you can find my contact information here. It’s also on the syllabus. It’s on the homepage of Canvas. I, I’m easy to get ahold of, so feel free to reach out anytime. Um, these announcements videos will be posted roughly every week, uh, and unlike a lot of the other videos in this course, these are totally unscripted. This is just me talking through some slides as I go through everything. Uh, I’m recording this right now just right after I recorded the new course introduction video. That is a more formal video introducing the course that has some scripting behind it. This is totally unscripted as I talk through some things that I think are going to be important as you go through the first week of this course.
So big picture in this course, this is a course that really deals with object-oriented programming and building larger scale projects, um, taking you from some of the early learning that you did around programming and data structures and building it out to stuff that’s closer to what you’d see in an actual industry setting for programming. Uh, so we’re gonna learn a lot of things we haven’t done before, such as unit testing, design patterns, working with graphical interfaces, web interfaces, uh, serializing data, and we’re gonna do this through, uh, three different things. We’ve got a lot of interactive examples where I will walk you through the process step-by-step and have you follow along in Codio, and then you’ll be able to take that example and adapt that to a pres- a project we’re doing called the Restaurant Project. The Restaurant Project is all about building a point of sale system for a fictional restaurant. It will involve, uh, data classes. It will also involve a user interface and a web interface.
And then you’ll also be working on a final project of your own design in the background that will be roughly similar in size and scale, uh, to the Restaurant Project. It will be a little bit smaller, but it will be along the same lines as the Restaurant Project, and this is really the first time that we get to take the training wheels off and let you go on your own path in as far as building a project in this program.
Some new technologies that we’ll talk about this semester, uh, first and foremost is Git. Um, Git is a code management tool that you’ll see a lot in industry. It helps you keep track of your code, roll back changes, branching. There’s lots of stuff we can do, so we’ll introduce Git. Uh, we’ll also use Tox for automation. It allows you to run a lot of commands automated, uh, so you can verify things like syntax and type checking. And of course, we’re gonna do type checking, unit testing, style checking, documentation, all of these things that are a big part of actually writing large scale industrial programs. Um, so we’ll work on a lot of these new technologies throughout the semester.
One new thing that’s going on this semester in particular is there has been a lot of changes in the way that we have to do, uh, learning materials in this course. Uh, specifically, we used to use GitHub Classroom to manage all the GitHub repositories for this course. Uh, GitHub Classroom has been deprecated by GitHub, uh, kind of unexpectedly in May, and so we don’t have access to that anymore. Uh, I am working on a new tool that will replace GitHub Classroom. It has not been approved for use yet at K State, but it is in process right now. Uh, I don’t think it’s gonna be ready in time, so we’re gonna do some manual GitHub repos. I’m just gonna manually create the repos that we need since we have a small enough class. It will take a couple of days for me to do that, and there’s an assignment early on in the semester where you send me your GitHub username so that I can link the repos up correctly. Um, so just be aware of that. The other thing I’ve done is I’ve embedded all of the starter code for the examples in Codio itself. And so for most of the example projects, we won’t have to go through the process of cloning a GitHub repo, doing the work, and committing back to GitHub. We’re just not gonna do that in the examples for this semester. We’ll just do them directly in Codio. Uh, the Restaurant Project, final project, and a couple of the examples we will do in GitHub, and so you’ll follow that project. Um, basically, anywhere in the examples you see it referred to, you know, accept the GitHub repo and clone the repo, you don’t have to do that, I’ve already done that for you, um, is really the big thing. I’m hoping this is temporary. I’m hoping that by next semester I have my new platform approved for use so that I can go back to the way I had been doing it, which is managing all of this through GitHub. We’ll see if that actually gets approved. Um, so please bear with me as I figure this out. This is the first semester since I started teaching this course that GitHub Classroom’s not been available. Um, the other thing I will point out is if you see anything that’s wrong or incorrect in the courses, please remember there’s a bug bounty assignment, so you can submit those directly to me, and I will get them fixed, and you get some extra credit. So this is a good opportunity to fish for some extra credit as we go through this change around GitHub.
So like I talked about earlier, in this class, you’re going to work on a final project. Uh, the final project is a topic of your choice, although I encourage you to kind of align with what the Restaurant Project does, so some sort of a business oriented piece of software that stores and presents data. We’ll meet early on in the semester to discuss scope and scale for this project, and then at the end of the semester you’ll create a presentation you’ll present to the class, and you’ll check in with me a few times throughout the semester. So don’t worry about the final project much right now. We’ll talk about it when we meet, uh, individually one-on-one over these first couple of weeks of class. So the first week is really just some administrative stuff and in going through an example project I like to call the Hello Real World Project. Uh, it goes through all the steps of creating a, uh, software engineering project from scratch that is the Hello World Project, but it includes unit testing and documentation and type checking and style checking and all of the things we’re gonna do in this class. Um, you also get to introduce yourself on Ed Discussion, which is a great way to meet other students in this class and to get to know me a little bit.
Then after that, we’ll switch gears. We’ll start working on the actual Restaurant Project. We’ll do a milestone that’s all about building a class library for an object-oriented data project. Um, that project is pretty good sized. It’s about two thousand and twenty-five hundred actual lines of code. It’s a lot of boilerplate code, but you still have to be very thoughtful about how you design it so you don’t end up repeating stuff in weird and interesting ways. Uh, then we’ll go into week three, which is all about documentation and unit testing. This is probably one of the larger milestones in the class. Uh, it ends up being about four thousand lines of code. Much of it is just repeated unit tests, but it’s a really good opportunity for you to practice your skills writing a lot of unit tests and writing them in a way that is very flexible and easily repeated. Uh, it also gives you a good chance to catch errors in your previous code. Then we’ll spend some time introducing inheritance and polymorphism and refactoring some of our old code, and this will get us toward the end of September when we get a chance to meet again for our second final project milestone and move into October. After that, we’ll t- spend some time talking about, uh, design patterns, graphical user interfaces, libraries, web, all sorts of stuff. Um, this class goes through a ton of cool stuff that you haven’t seen before, and I’m really excited. Uh, most students really report that this is the class that makes programming finally start to come together and make sense. So I hope you have that same experience.
One cool thing that we’re doing this semester is you get to choose your restaurant project that you want to use. Uh, the one that’s linked in Canvas and is mostly for the current semester is a project called Game Grub, uh, which is about, uh, building a restaurant around different board games. Uh, I also have an older one called Starfleet Subs that is a, a submarine sandwich shop based around Starfleet from Star Trek. Uh, you can do either one of those restaurant projects. You just have to let me know which one you’re going to do. It will become pretty obvious after your first week. Um, the only rule is if you are retaking this course and you did some of these in the previous semester, you need to switch to the other restaurant project. Um, that’s really why I keep two of them is so if you’re doing retakes, you do the other restaurant that you didn’t do the first time you took this course.
So some quick advice for success in this course. This is a four-credit-hour course. Four credit hours means you’re expected to work anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours each week in this course. I can guarantee from prior students they have reported that that number is pretty accurate. Um, so if you’re working full-time or part-time, if you’ve got other classes, make sure you are leaving enough time in your schedule to work on this course. Twelve to sixteen hours is a good baseline to start with. Um, so schedule your time very wisely. Uh, every assignment you’ve got a week to work on, and you can work ahead. So start early on your assignments and leave time for questions. The big thing I don’t want t- to see you do is if an assignment’s due on Monday and you start working on it Friday night, there’s not a whole lot of time in there for me to answer questions. Um, I don’t work over the weekends as much. Uh, I am available. I try and answer questions when I can, but I also have a life, and I need to do things on my own over the weekend. So just be warned that, uh, if you start on a Friday and you expect to get questions answered over the weekend, it may take me some time to do that. Um, working in this class, make sure you’re being very careful about copy-pasting. Um, there’s a lot of opportunities to deduplicate code, but if you’re not very careful about changing your variables, you can cause a lot of problems. And then of course, especially for the restaurant project and the final project, you’ll have access to Git and GitHub. So commit often and push often so that if you run into any problems, you can roll back. And then, of course, don’t be afraid to use and cite online resources. Um, you know, the big thing is for a lot of these projects, I don’t want you using GenAI to build your code, but any Google search you do today involves an AI tool. And so I’m aware of that, and I just want to know that you’re doing the work yourself and not just pasting in AI. Uh, and so be warned that there will be some times where I’ll ask you to describe code or describe things you’re working on, and that will factor very heavily into some of your grades. So just be aware of that.
I talked about this in the course introduction, but just be aware that this course uses a, uh, stoplight policy for GenAI. Red is a lot of the examples and quizzes and the, uh, big assessments, uh, where you should not use GenAI at all. Um, any suspected GenAI use will be treated as a violation of the Honor Council and may be, uh, subject to penalties. Yellow is what I tend to use for a lot of the restaurant project and the final project where you can use AI if you need to ask it questions or get clarification on something, but AI should not be writing your code at all. Um, the only time you’re really going to see green in this course is when we do our UI design for the web and the GUI part. You can use AI to help with your UI design only. You should not be using it for the actual functionality, but for the UI designs, I’m allowing you to use GenAI without much restriction there.
In keeping with this policy, I wanna be honest with my students about how I use GenAI. Um, I very much do not believe in using GenAI for grading and communication, so any email you get from me, any grading feedback you get from me, that is my own work and my own words. That’s really what you’re paying me for as your instructor is my, uh, expertise in this course. So I don’t use GenAI for any of that. I do reserve the right to use GenAI to help me do code reviews. Uh, in this course, I get a lot of projects that are several thousand lines of code, and it’s just unfeasible for me to read all of that. And so I may make some use of GenAI to help me do some code reviews. Um, but again, any of the feedback that you’re going to get from me is my own work and my own words. Um, usually I let GenAI point out things, and then I will go back and review that myself and confirm what GenAI finds, and then that will be the feedback that you’ll get. Um, I may also use it to generate lesson and learning content, mostly images and fake scenarios and things like that. Um, as of right now, no GenAI content exists in this course, but I wanna be very open and honest about the way I approach GenAI in this course. And so anytime I do use it, you will see that. Uh, but rest assured any communication you get from me is actually from me.
So that’s really, uh, all I got for this first video. Uh, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to keep in touch. Um, this is by far the longest announcements video you’re gonna get. Uh, most of them are shorter, about three to four minutes. But this first week, this is kind of that first ten minutes of the class where I get to introduce myself in the class and talk to you about what’s going on. Uh, if you have any questions, you can reach out to me on Ed Discussion. You can shoot me an email, uh, to the cc410-help email address. I’m on Microsoft Teams. I’m also on the CS Discord server if you’re there. Uh, and then I also am hosting some office hours. You’ll see some more information about tea time office hours and one-on-one office hours. Lots of opportunities for you to reach out if you have any questions for me at all. So best of luck this semester. I’m rooting for you. I know you can do it. Um, this class tends to be a very difficult course but also a very award– rewarding course as you go through it. So I hope you really enjoy this experience. Uh, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out anytime. Otherwise, best of luck, and I will see you again next week.