Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week one Announcements video for CIS 526 and CC 515 in summer 2022. These announcements videos are going to be a little bit more unscripted than what you’re used to. So please bear with me as I work through all this content. My name is Russell Feldhausen. And I’ll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is shown here. It’s also on the syllabus, it’s on the canvas homepage, it’s very many places. If you have any questions, you can email me my email is russfeld@ksu.edu. Email is generally my preferred method of communication if you need to chat with me directly. But as I’ll talk about in just a second, we’ll most likely use discord for most things in this course.
So the course structure itself consists of gated modules on Canvas, there are eight modules consisting of eight weeks worth of content. So you’ll work through about one module per week, please make sure you go look at the modules and check the due dates, there are items inside of the modules that are due at various times throughout the week. Generally, a lot of the tutorials and activities are due on Fridays. And then the milestones are due the following Monday. So make sure you keep on top on top of that there’s a ton of content to work through. So check the due dates on canvas. But like we said, There’s eight modules, there are six milestones that you’ll be working through. Most of it’s going to be posted on canvas. By the time you see this video, I’m still working on the last couple of weeks worth of content. But hopefully it should be posted soon enough so you can get started.
In this course, we’re going to be using Codio. Codio is an online integrated development environment for education. It’s really, really handy for learning web development. It gives you access to a full Linux virtual machine on the web, and you’ll have root access to that machine. So if you need to install or configure anything, you sure can. However, we’ve already provided a standardized environment with all of the tools and libraries that you’ll need already pre installed. So most of the time, you don’t have to do much of anything to be able to do your work. The other nice thing about working in Codio is it gives me as your instructor direct access to your homework. So as you’re working through an activity or tutorial, or even one of the milestones, if you have a question, you don’t have to send me your code or screenshots or anything like that. Just tell me what assignments you’re on. And I can go load up your code your project and see exactly what you’re seeing and help you work through it and debug it. I can even see as you’re typing and changing code. And so it works out really, really well. So please take advantage of Codio and use it throughout this course, it really does work well for this particular class.
We’re also going to use GitHub classroom, the only assignment we’re going to put in GitHub classroom is the milestone. But by doing so it gives us some centralized organization for all the Git repos that we’re going to create. It also creates a feedback pull request, which I can use to give you feedback on your code and style in your projects. And it helps us by keeping your code private within that organization until the end of the semester, you definitely don’t want to be the student that has an open repo, and then somebody starts stealing your work. And then we run into academic integrity issues. So we’ll use GitHub classroom. You’ll see that later on in the first milestone, but most of you are probably already familiar with it having gone through either CIS 400 or CC 410.
So like I said, for communication in this course, the primary place we’re going to do that is in discord. There’s a channel already created on the computer science Discord server for this class. So anytime you have questions in this course you want to discuss anything you’re having trouble with particular assignment. Start out by asking questions in discord. That’s by far the best way to do this. It allows me to answer questions quickly and easily. You can post little code snippets or screenshots, if needed, and other students can chime in and they can see the answers that I give. So Discord is by far the best place to start. If you have any personal issues or grading questions or any to do’s for me, then please email me directly. That way it comes in my inbox, I use that as my to do list. The thing that I will say is email is the official version of communication for this course. And so if you send me an email, I will strive to respond to it within one business day. However, Discord is much more flexible and easier to use. And so I think for most communication in this class, we’ll do discord. But if you don’t get an answer, or you need anything specific, you can always email me and I will respond to it there.
So one big thing to keep in mind in this course, is how to be successful. First and foremost, I really want you to come into this course with a growth mindset. You can learn how to do this, it might be a little tricky, but come in with the knowledge knowing that you can figure this out and be willing to learn and change is a big part of it. So coming in with that growth mindset is super important. The other thing that is super important in this class is not to just read and watch the stuff that you’re doing, but to actually engage with it. For example, a lot of this course consists of activities and tutorials that you work through and co do. And we give you most of the code, you can actually complete the tutorials just by copy pasting code into the right file, hitting submit, you’ll complete the tutorial. However, if you don’t engage with that code and try and write it yourself and understand exactly what lines of code you’re using. You’re not actually learning anything. You’re just copy pasting and so I can get in Do I work through an entire week’s worth of content in this class in about four hours just by copy pasting content, because I needed to check the auto graders to make sure they worked. But I didn’t learn anything. So it really is imperative that you take the time to engage with the content, understand every single line of code and every single function that you’re writing. So that you can then do that yourself. When you get to the milestone, it’s really, really hard. If you just skim through the content, complete the assignment, and then get to the milestone, and you haven’t really learned anything. Another big thing I encourage you to do in this class is to work iteratively, a lot of the milestones will have five or six different things you’re working on, try and pick one and work on it till completion, before you get to the next part, you can work iteratively test and check your work. Don’t try and build the whole thing and then run it and see if it breaks. The other thing you can do, especially since we’re using Git in this class is to save your work early and save it often commit to GitHub, every time you work on something on the project, you can always roll back to a previous commit if you need to. So make sure you’re committing early committing often. And then finally, in this course, don’t be afraid to ask for help. This course especially we’re going to push you a little bit and try and get you to do some things that you’ll need to do a little bit of research to figure out how to do it. And we expect you to be able to do that. But there are times when you’re going to get stuck when things are not going to work. And so I usually tell students, if you’ve been spinning your wheels on a problem for about an hour, and you’ve been doing some searching and you’ve tried different things and you haven’t gotten past it, that’s a good time to take a step back, ask for help and get some inputs. The thing that I hate to see the most is students to spend five or six hours trying to solve a problem. And then when they ask for help, it turns out that it’s an unsolvable problem to begin with. And so it’s always worth taking the time and asking for help. If you get stuck, I’m always here to help you out. I’m going through the projects exactly the same as you’re going through them. And so I’m happy to help you anytime you have a question.
So throughout this course, we’re going to work on a large web development project called Community Chest. The idea behind Community Chest is kind of like the blessing boxes or some of those lending libraries that you’ve seen, where you have a location where people can put items that other people in the community might need. So we’re going to track those throughout the semester. There are six milestones to this project, most of the milestones focus on the functionality of the website. So being able to render a page that has certain content on it, being able to accept data via forms and stored in a database. So most of the milestones are around the functionality of the website. However, because this is a web development course, your style and design does count. So not only the the visual style of the website, but the coding style, making sure you’re taking advantage of the features of cascading style sheets and building JavaScript modules. And not you know, copy pasting code everywhere, you’re actually thinking about the structure and the content of your webpage. So like I said, mostly we’re looking for functionality, but style and design do count. And you’re more than welcome to make this your own. You can spend lots of time on the design in this course, and really make it functional and beautiful. And also bear in mind that the final milestone does have a 20 point bonus on it for really good looking websites. So it’s worth your time to take your time and actually build a useful website. For the milestones themselves. You can use external libraries in most of those milestones. So make sure you read the bottom what you can and can’t use. But if you want to use a CSS library, such as Bootstrap, or a JavaScript library, such as jQuery, look at the milestones, make sure that that’s allowed. And of course, if you have any questions, you can ask me anytime.
So that’s really all the content you need to get started on this course. Throughout the semester, I highly encourage you to keep in touch by following the discussions on the discord channel, you, you one of your first assignments is going to be introducing yourself on Discord. So make sure you get that done soon. Another thing that we do throughout the semester is we will have tea time office hours. Tea Time office hours are Tuesdays at 3:30 and Fridays at 10:30. The whole point behind tee time office hours is it’s a time for us to get together and talk about anything except the class that you’re working on. Typically, it’s myself and a few other faculty members at K State where we just get together and we hang out while we work on stuff. Sometimes we have other students or alumni or industry folks stop by. So it’s a great time if you just want to hang out chat with us. Even if you just hang out in the background and listen to what we’re talking about while you work on the assignments. You’re more than welcome to join us for tea time. Again, that’s on Zoom Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. You’ll get the link via discord. And then finally if you have any questions you can schedule a one on one office hours with me using my Calendly link. It’s on the syllabus it’s on the course homepage on canvas. That’s your easiest way if you want to get one on one office hours with me. However, I encourage you to try and work on it on your own and work through discord first and only schedule office hours if you really feel like you need that interactive work with me. I do reserve the right to limit my access to Office Hours in case it becomes a problem.
So other than that, best of luck to you on this semester. That should be everything you need to get started on the first module. I will strike have to post announcements videos about once per week so watch for those usually on Mondays as always if you have any questions you can reach out to me on Discord you can find me via email and I will look forward to having you in this class this semester Good luck