Hello and welcome to the first week of CC 210. My name is Russell Feldhausen and I’m one of the instructors for this course.
My goal is every week to make a new video just for the students in this course to provide quick updates on what we’re doing, on updates to the course and see where everybody’s going. As you can tell from this video, instead of all the other videos, this is completely unscripted. So this is just me talking you through things that are in my mind, things that might be interesting or exciting to you. And so hopefully this is a really good resource for you as you go through this course.
Right now everybody should be able to fill out the survey on Canvas that asks you what programming language you’d like to choose. You have the option this semester of choosing either Java or Python. Generally if you’re not sure which one to choose, I would probably recommend Python. I actually really guess that about 90% of the class will be doing it in Python this year. But if you’d like to learn Java, there are some really good reasons to learn Java as well. Java was the first programming language I learned. Either one of those options would be really great. What I’d like students to do is fill out that quick survey on the CC 210 course on Canvas by Wednesday, and then I can put you into the actual course on Canvas for the language you’d like to learn, either Java or Python.
This semester we have two graduate teaching assistants working with me, Josh and Kyle. You’ll probably see them quite a bit on Piazza and they may also be featured in some of the later tutorial videos that we’re going to be recording. So if you get a chance, feel free to say hi to them on Piazza. You may also see them around the Computer Science department if you’re ever in that area. This fall we’re actually working on a lot of new things for this course.
This is a brand new course. Right now we only have the first five modules published to Canvas. I’ve got another six modules written. We just need to record the videos for those and we’ll hopefully get those published sometime in mid-September. And then I have about three more modules in the planning stages that I’m hoping to get written and recorded by the end of the semester. So at the end of the semester, there should be 14 modules in this course, roughly one module a week, especially if you include this first module as a week in the course.
Some of the other cool things we’re working on is we’re building a new video recording studio for this program. Right now I’m actually recording these videos in my house in Kansas City. This is my current setup that I have for recording videos, but later this semester we will actually switch to a full-on recording studio. So we’ll go from several hundred dollars of recording equipment to several thousand dollars worth of recording equipment. So I’m really excited about that.
As I’ve mentioned before, this is a brand new course and so with it being a brand new course, we’re definitely going to run into a few bugs and a few issues along the way. One of the big things that I’ve done in this course is I’ve made extra credit points into what I call a bug bounty program. So if you find any errors in the course, any typos, if you have any suggestions, if something doesn’t work for you, please post a note in Piazza and let me know and either myself or the TAs, will try and get that fixed as soon as we can, and depending on what we find, we may be able to give you some bug bounty points toward this. I’ve done this once before when I taught my online system administration class the first time, and I think over the course of the semester I had not quite, but almost a hundred bugs presented by students. And so it was a really great way for students to earn some extra credit points in this program. So feel free to do that.
You’ll also have the ability to earn extra credit by what’s kinda… what I call helping hands. In Piazza your fellow students can ask questions and if you think you know the answer or have something you’d like to add to the discussion, you can post a reply in Piazza to any public question that you see and if your replies are really helpful, you’ll actually earn some extra credit points for that as well. So, it’s a really great way to encourage interaction in an online course even though we don’t actually meet face to face.
Finally, just a quick note about office hours. As I mentioned in the syllabus, I’m working remotely from my home in Kansas City, but I do plan to be on campus about once a week, every Wednesday. And so if you need to meet with me in person, I should be available on Wednesdays. Also in the syllabus and in every email that you’ll ever receive from me, there is a Calendly link at the bottom that allows you to go online and schedule a one on one meeting with me. For meetings when I’m not in Manhattan, I’ll be able to meet via Zoom, which is a video chat software that K-State has. If you want to meet with me in person, you can schedule a time on a Wednesday. And if I’m on campus, I will try and meet with you in person, in my office on campus. As the semester goes, we will look at the interest in doing office hours, either with myself or my GTAs. And so, here in a couple of weeks we’ll send out a quick poll to see how people are interested in that and if that would be something worthwhile. I suspect it will be. And so we’ll try and schedule a couple of times each week where either myself or my GTAs are available for office hours, either in Manhattan or virtually or both.
Finally, since this is a really new course, we’re going to try a lot of new things and we’re going to throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So you might expect some really crazy things. We’ll probably do some Twitch style livestreams where we start with a programming problem and try and solve it. We might do some team programming exercises between myself and the GTAs or we may even bring some of you in to the studio and see if you’d like to be a part of that. I’m going to be working with several other faculty members that you’ll probably see throughout the semester. We’re also going to try and record some interviews of industry partners as they come to campus and share that with this program as well. So there’s a lot of cool things we want to try. If you have any questions or anything that you think would be really useful to you in this program as you go forward, please let me know. Send me an email. We’re really excited to try all sorts of new stuff in this course and it’s really been freeing for me to have the support of our department and all of the faculty to be able to do some really crazy ideas in this course.
So that’s all I can think about for the first week. It’s been kind of a, a stormy, rainy day in Kansas City, so I’m just now getting this video recorded. It’s a little bit after noon. The thunder has finally stopped to the point where I can actually see what’s going on. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me or ping me on Piazza once you get access to that. But the biggest things to do right now is fill out the language survey quiz on the original Canvas course that will get you access to the actual Canvas course for this program. And then you can start working through module 1. Module 1 is not due until the day after Labor Day, so you’ve got until next Tuesday to get that finished. But then the next module, the “Hello World' module is due the Monday after that. And every module will be due on Mondays from here on out.
So again, my name’s Russ, I’m looking forward to having you in this class. Feel free to email me if you have any questions and if not, good luck on week one and I’ll be back next week with a new video.
Bloopers
[beep] Greetings and welcome to the Computational Core program. My name is Russell Feldhausen, and I’ll be one of the [thunder in background]
[beep] as you can tell. Um, I should not do that. Umm… yeah, I should probably start over.