Spring '23 Week 1
YouTube VideoResources
Video Script
Unknown Speaker 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CC 515 in spring 2023. My name is Russell Feldhausen. And I’ll be your instructor this semester. My contact information is here in the slide, you can also find it on canvas and you can find it on the syllabus. The big thing to be aware of is I mostly work remotely from my home in Shawnee, Kansas, which is near Kansas City. But I am on Campus, usually every Monday, this semester, most of you may be remote as well. And that’s fine, I’ll mostly meet with you via zoom, it should be pretty easy. You can contact me the easiest way to get me as russfeld@ksu.edu. But I also exist on the CS Discord server and on K State instance of Microsoft Teams, so you can find me there as well.
So this course is all about learning how to do web application development using tools such as JavaScript, Node and express JS will also work a little bit on the front end, but not a whole lot. You’ll learn some techniques such as Ajax and eventually how to build an actual web application following the model view controller paradigm. There’s a lot of cool stuff that we cover. This course is structured via gated modules on Canvas, there’s roughly one module each week. Since this is normally a summer class that we’re stretching it out through semester, it’s maybe one module every other week, check the due dates for the modules, everything should be posted, all the due dates are out there. And mainly this class is taught through a lot of activities and interactive tutorials. And then there are six milestones where you get to apply what you’ve learned and build your own web app.
So in this course, we’re going to use Codio most of you are probably familiar with Codio an online Integrated Development Environment backed by a Linux virtual machine. The nice thing about Codio is it gives us a very standardized environment for web development. And it gives me as the teacher access into your code so I can help you test and debug things. Codio are really does make teaching this class so so much easier than it used to be. So I highly encourage you to dive in headfirst with Codio. And take advantage of all the tools that it provides. This class, we’re also going to use GitHub classroom hopefully you’re familiar with that you’ve probably seen it in an earlier class at this point. It provides a lot of centralized organization for the class, it allows me to respond to your code via feedback, pull requests, and then you can keep your code private while still sharing it with me so I can see what’s going on. So in this course, there’s a few different methods of communication. We’ve got discord, which is a great place to ask questions about the course have discussions, anything like that, there’s already a channel created on Discord for CC 515, it’s co listed with CIS 526, which is the same course. So feel free to take advantage of discord and use it wherever you can. The one of the first assignments in the course is to actually get on Discord and introduce yourself to the class. So make sure you do that there will also have email, you can email me if you have any personal issues, grading issues, anything that you’d like me to do, etc. Please feel free to email that to me. As I tell a lot of students email is the official communication of record for this course. But Discord is a little bit more flexible, if you’d like to use that.
So here’s some tips for success in this class. First and foremost, you have to come into this class with a growth mindset, you have to be willing to learn and you have to understand that you can learn by doing as long as you pay attention and take advantage of all the resources you provided. When we’re teaching stuff in this class, there’ll be a lot of examples where you can just skim through the example, copy paste the code, hit the greater button, and it will auto grant and it will work. I can attest to that I was able to speed run through all of the content in this class in about 16 hours by doing that. However, I didn’t learn anything by doing that. And so to really learn what we’re trying to teach you in this class, you can’t just skim through and read and watch, you have to engage in the class. One thing I really encourage you to do is whenever we’re giving you example code, and we’re having you build the example projects, I encourage you to retype that code by hand and think about what it says maybe rename the variables, maybe reordered the code lines a little bit to really understand what it does and how it works, so that you can reproduce it later. So by engaging in that content, you’ll be able to learn what we’re trying to teach and you’ll be able to more easily adapt it and use it in your milestones. I also encourage you to work iteratively one of the big mistakes that people make on web development courses is they try and build the whole back end in one shot and then start trying to test it. And that’s really hard to do. So try and think about as you’re working how you can get to a point where you can test something, even if it’s just a simple Sunday HelloWorld on this page first, and then work from there, maybe dump a variable. So you can see that the template is getting all the variable data before you start trying to render the template. There’s a lot of cool things you can do with that. You can use both the terminal encoder as well as the console in your web browser, such as Chrome to see some of those debugging outputs. So take advantage of that work iteratively. And then of course save your work early and often. You’ve got access to get I expect you to commit to get every time you get something working so that you can roll back if you make a mistake and go back to a known good state. Every milestone you should have multiple commits to get I really encourage students to take advantage of that. And then of course, the last big thing you can do is if you get stuck in this course ask for help. I do don’t expect anybody to go through a 500 level computer science course and not get stuck and ask for help. At least once we do build these courses to really stress you out a little bit and try and get you to learn, the only way you can really learn is by having those moments where you have to overcome some difficulty. But if you do get stuck, don’t be afraid to ask for help. A good methodology to think about is if you’re spinning your wheels, and you haven’t made any forward progress in about a half hour of trying, that’s a good opportunity to take a step back, ask for help and get unstuck, so you can keep going.
So in this class, one of the things you’re going to be working on is a milestone project. It’s called Community Chest. There are six milestones for this project. The first couple of milestones are pretty easy. If you’ve got a decent background in static web development, the last four milestones add a lot of functionality to that. We are focused mostly on functionality for this, I don’t care quite as much about design, but style and design do count. There are some things in the milestones where your design should be functional, it should be flexible, and it should automatically adapt to things such as the browser width. So that works both mobile and on a desktop browser. However, you can make it your own. If you want to add additional style css, if you want to change the fonts a little bit, add additional functionality, as long as we can see the core functionality we’re looking for. Feel free to embellish this project as much as you’d like to really demonstrate your skills and to just practice with some new stuff.
So other than that, if you have any questions in this course, I encourage you to keep in touch, you can have a discussion on Discord, you can create a zoom discussion using the Calendly link that you’ll find either on canvas or in the syllabus. I also host Tea Time office hours, which is every Tuesday 330 and Friday at 1130. myself along with David Invirgo, one of the CS advisors, we host tea time, it’s a great time to get together meet with faculty, staff, and fellow students talk about life, the universe and everything are just hanging out while you’re working on homework. So I encourage you to attend t time if you’re interested. And then of course, you can also schedule a one on one office hour with me anytime using Calendly. So that’s all there is for this class. Right now I’ve only got two people enrolled in this class. We’re doing this as kind of a little special enrollment for students that need it so they can graduate on time. So there’s not a whole lot going on with this class. Most likely I won’t post regular announcements videos, I may post a few throughout the semester just right after the milestones is a quick check in. I encourage you to keep in touch with me maybe meet with me once in a while just to check in and see how things are doing. If you have any questions, feel free to email me anytime. Otherwise, I will mostly be in touch via email and via feedback on your work throughout the semester. But I look forward to seeing all the work that you do and I hope you have a really good time in this class. So good luck and I look forward to talking with you in a few weeks.