Hello and welcome to the week 5 announcements video. First off, don’t forget that module 3 is due today, Monday, 9/23, it’s due at 11:59 PM. It looks like everybody is progressing pretty well through the conditionals modules, but if you have any questions, you can contact us on Piazza anytime this evening. I’ll do my best to respond as fast as I can.
For next week, you’ll be working on module 4, which is the module on conditionals. This is where we really start getting into this structure of programming. We’re going to be studying if statements, if-else statements, studying how to nest those statements together to make more complex structures. And we’ll also cover a little bit about handling user input. That module is due a week from today, Monday, September 30th, again at 11:59 PM.
Some other quick announcements for this week. First off, a quick reminder about office hours. Don’t forget that both of our GTAs, Josh and Kyle are holding regular office hours. Kyle is available Mondays and Fridays at 9:30 and Josh’s available Mondays and Wednesdays at 10:30 actually about 10:20. They’re both available in the engineering building and online via Zoom. Although if you want to join them via Zoom, they do ask that you email them first so that they can get the Zoom room set up. Also, as a quick reminder, if you have any questions about this course or any feedback that you’d like to share with us, please post that on Piazza so that all of us see that. It’s really helpful because that way if I’m unavailable or one of my GTAs is unavailable, whoever is available can respond to that very quickly.
I also really encourage you to post questions and things on Piazza publicly if you don’t mind. It does allow other students in the class to see those questions, but for us as an instructors and for other students, it helps them see what types of questions are being asked. It might even be a question that they haven’t thought about asking themselves. And so by sharing that publicly on Piazza, we can all learn together as a community.
Another thing that’s going on this week is on Tuesday morning, tomorrow morning, I’ll be pushing a whole bunch of course updates to this course. What that involves is me going in the backend and publishing updates and changes to content on Codio, and then making that content available in Piazza and in Canvas. So those updates will happen tomorrow morning. The reason I do that on Tuesday morning is it’s right after the due date of a module, so hopefully not many people will be working on things Tuesday morning. There’s a couple of side effects to this process. First of all, it may generate a bunch of emails telling you that things you’ve already completed have been regraded. For now, you can just ignore those. We’re not worrying about that. Also remember that the due date for any module we’re going to be looking at when you submitted the confirmation quiz on Canvas. So don’t worry if any of your submission times have changed. We’ll be looking at that confirmation quiz. That tells us if you got it done on time.
The other thing that does is that will allow us to publish modules 6, 7 and 8 for this class. So that way there are 3 more modules ready to go. I’m also working on the videos and content for modules 9, 10 and 11 and hope to have those published within the next week or so. And then there’ll be three more after that, 12, 13 and 14, that should round out most of the content in the class.
Finally, a couple more quick updates. Don’t forget the today is the last day to drop a class with a 50% refund and then one week from today. Next Monday, is the last day to drop a class without a “W” being recorded on your transcript. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I want you to drop these courses. I’d prefer if you don’t cause I think they’re really cool, but I like to remind students about this because a lot of students, when I was an advisor, complained that they didn’t know when these due dates are. And a lot of teachers aren’t very good about talking about that. So I figured I’d be very upfront and tell you when these due dates are, when these deadlines are, that way if you do need to drop a class, either this one or another one in your class schedule, you’ll remember to do that.
Other than that, it’s the first week of fall. I hope everybody’s having a great semester so far. If you’re interested in the curriculum design of this course and some of the other things we’re doing in computer science, a quick shameless plug, I spoke at the K-State Have a Byte program, which was last Friday. I gave a seven minute talk about the curriculum structure of this course. If you want to check that out, you can find it on my personal website, russfeld. me or you can shoot me an email or find me online and I can share that link with you. But it’s a really good behind the scenes look at what we’re trying to do with the design of this course, if you’re so interested.
Other than that, I hope you have a great week and I will look forward to hearing from you and working with you next week. Take care.