Good morning and welcome to the week 7 announcements video. First off, don’t forget that module 5 is due this week on Wednesday, October the 9th at 5:00 PM. Please note the new date and time for that module to be due. Hopefully by now you’ve started on the project from module 5, but if not, I encourage you to do that yet today.
Also don’t forget that we have office hours either this morning. Both of my GTAs are available and on Wednesday there’s at least one GTA available. Also, if you can’t make any of those office hours times, you can always email or post on Piazza, either myself or the GTAs, we can schedule times outside of normal office hours to meet with you.
For next week, you’ll be starting on module 6, which is a module on arrays or lists. Python uses lists, but most other languages use arrays as that term. So I have both terms listed. Basically with lists, you’ll be able to store more data in a single variable and you’ll learn about how to use operations and loops with those lists. And finally you’ll learn how to do multidimensional lists. So this is a really fun module to expand your horizons in terms of programming. That module is due next Wednesday, October the 16th also at 5:00 PM. I will warn you the project for the lists module is a little bit complex. You’re actually going to build a tic-tac-toe game that allows you to have an arbitrary sized tic-tac-toe board, so you want to make sure you save a couple of days to work on that project because it can take a little while to get through all of the bits and pieces of that project.
Another thing I wanted to talk about this morning is Piazza. Once again, I want to remind you to please use Piazza for all communication in this course. Anytime that you feel like you would sit down and write an email to either myself or the GTAs, instead, I’d prefer if you do that via Piazza. We do that for a couple of reasons. First off for us, it allows us to better track the communication we’re having with students throughout this course. And if you ask a question and one of us isn’t available, the other GTA or instructors can really quickly answer that question for you. When you post on Piazza, please take a minute to give your post a very descriptive title. If you’re working on a particular project or textbook section that really helps us narrow down exactly what you’re talking about. Also, don’t forget that the editor in Piazza has buttons for formatting, using code and markdown. So if you need to copy and paste source code from any of your assignments, you can use the code block. If you’re familiar with writing markdown through GitHub, the markdown button is really useful for that. Also, when you post a question, we encourage you to consider posting that question publicly so everyone in the class can see that question. Very likely, if you have a question, other students in the class may also have the same question. And so it allows us to start a really good discussion with your fellow classmates around that discussion. Finally, as you’re posting on Piazza, don’t forget that you can be earning bug bounty and helping hand extra credit points. So if you see someone post a question that you know how to answer, you can fill in on that discussion. And if you see any problems in any of the source code and you have the textbook, the assignments, anything that we have created for this course, you can submit that to Piazza and get access to those bug bounty extra credit points.
Other than that, don’t forget that we’re almost halfway through the semester. There’s one week to go until week 8. So most of your classes are probably gearing up for midterms. Thankfully, we don’t have any midterms or exams in this class that you have to worry about, but I do wish you the best of luck on the midterms and the rest of your class. Good luck.