Aug 31 - getting started

hello

Welcome to the Fall 2021 Coding Workshop.

• course basics : what & how
• this website : resources, syllabus, assignments, shared work, wiki
• introductions

possible topics

I'm not sure yet exactly topics and tasks we'll take on; in part that depends on your background, skills, and interests. But some ideas I have at this point include

• your software toolbox : unix shell, editors, regex, git, make, ssh, scp, crypto keys, ...
• some advent of code exercises
• some project euler exercises
• looking at some different programming styles
• a team competition to write AI bots to play Tron
• groups writing code for projects such as Conway's game of life or a tic-tac-toe minmax AI
• contributing to an existing open source project

2 vs 3 credits

This courses is nominally offered for 2 credits, which means roughly 6 hours per week of coding practice and discussion.

If you would like to also work on your a project of your choice - advanced work or whatever - you may add an additional credit and 3 hours per week. Depending on how many of you want to do that, we'll find ways to work that into our regular Tuesday meetings, or schedule additional time somehow. However, I do expect to offer an "advanced projects" class in the Spring, probably 3-4 credits, specifically for junior and senior projects, so you may want to wait until then for that instead.

getting help

• Stacy & Quang are the CS tutors - more info on their schedule will be coming soon.
• You can work with others in the class on homework, just make sure that you say when you submit your work who you worked with and who did what. In other words, quote your sources. See the syllabus for more on this.
• There's a slack channel for this class #fall21-coding on bennington-cs.slack.com, which is a good place to ask questions. See the links to the left for an invite if you need one.
• Drop me an email at jimmahoney@bennington.edu if in doubt.

show-and-tell

This will be just a reminder for many of you, but just so we're all on the same page ...

jupyter.benningt.college is running a jupyterhub cloud server, which provides

• a browser-based GUI for viewing and editing files and folders
• a python Notebook platform, and
• a unix terminal.

I'll do a demo, including

• accessing and using the terminal
• using the browser file interface
• using the built-in editor
• creating and running a .ipynb python notebook
• editing a .py source file : editor or nano or vim or emacs
• running that .py source file from the terminal
• editing, compiling, running a C program
• other languages : node (js), javac/java, ...

this week

Once we're through the preliminaries, we'll use the remaining time to start on this week's assignment : a unix scavenger hunt and some fizzbuzz variations (languages, coding paradigms, generality, docs).

As with all of the assignments this semester, you should adopt these to your experience level and interests. I would like to see in your assignment submissions of roughly six hours of work per week. If the material is brand new to you, and you only get through part of the assignment, that's OK, as long as you make that clear in what you submit and discuss how you spent your time. If the assignment is easy and fast perhaps because you've seen something similar already, use the time to do something else related or explore a different language or paradigm.

Each week, I would like us all to discuss and go over some of the week's work. You can share your files with the class using the appropriate share folder, either signed or anonymously. You don't need to share something every week, but please do participate in this regular group code review. Depending on how this goes, I may be more explicit in future assignments.