Hello everyone and welcome to the week 10 announcements video. First off, my apologies for completely missing the announcements videos for the past couple of weeks. It’s been a really busy month of October for me and I unfortunately fell behind in getting some assignments posted in this class. But thankfully there really hasn’t been a whole lot of new announcements so you really didn’t miss out on much, but I want to try and be better about doing that.
So first off, don’t forget that module 8 is due this Wednesday at 5:00 PM. It’s the module over exceptions. The exceptions module is one of the ones that starts to get to some of the more difficult parts of programming. So I hope that that module goes really well for you, but always if you have questions, feel free to post on Piazza and that will alert both myself and the GTAs that we need to answer some questions. So please make sure you’re making use of that.
Also, you may have noticed in the class that there is not any more content posted on Canvas right now. I’ve actually been working on recording the videos for those this weekend. And so modules 9, 10 and 11 will go live sometime early this week, most likely before Wednesday evening, but it will be Wednesday evening at the latest. When I roll out updates for Codio, it does change a lot of things and so I try and put that around the time that a project is due or after a project is due just to avoid any complications there. But anyway, those three modules will be posted shortly. Module 9 covers files and file input and output. Module 10 covers functions and then Module 11 introduces classes and objects.
As you remember in this class there will be 14 modules total. So modules 12, 13 and 14 will be coming out in a couple of weeks after that. That will be the end of the class following the deadlines that will make module 14 due the Wednesday of dead week. The goal is to have everything in this class wrapped up before finals week, but that does give you a chance if you’re running a little bit behind, you can complete and make up some late work all the way through the end of finals week before grades are due.
A couple of other big things in this class. I’ve been slowly handing off a lot of the responsibility on Piazza to the GTAs and they’ve been doing a really great job of answering questions and getting back to people very quickly. So if you post a question on Piazza, most likely your first response will come from the GTA’s. If there’s additional follow up or the GTAs have questions, they’re really good at referring things to me and I’ll be able to answer those there. I’d love to be more active on Piazza, but unfortunately toward the end of the semester I become a bit more busy and so it’s hard for me to be very responsive on Piazza. So I’m really letting the GTAs take that first post on Piazza and then I can follow up if needed. Of course, if you have any grading questions or policy questions or things like that, I will definitely jump in where I can to answer those questions.
One big announcement that’s coming up for next spring. If you’re looking at taking the next course in this program, which is CC 310, it’s the first data structures and algorithms course. Starting in Spring 2020, we’re able to offer a lower tuition rate for these classes. Right now these classes are offered only as online classes and so you have to pay the extra Global Campus fee to take this course, which I think comes to around $800 for this course. What we’re doing in Spring 2020 is we’re creating an on-campus section of this course. What that means is if you enroll in the on campus section and you are an on campus student, you will pay the usual on-campus rate for engineering courses, which is quite a bit lower than the global campus rate. However, if you are truly a remote student, and especially if you’re paying out of state tuition, the Global Campus rate actually ends up being cheaper, I believe, for most students in that position. So anyway, if you’re looking at doing stuff for the Computational Core or working toward the computer science certificate, we’re working on ways that we can lower the tuition cost for students and we’re taking that first step this Spring by offering an on-campus version of these courses. So feel free to enroll in those. If you’ve got friends or colleagues or people in your departments that you know are interested, please share this information with them. It should be in the K-State Today, Monday of this week as well, so we can share it around that way. But that’s one of the big things we want to do with this program is make it really accessible but also make it really affordable to students. We just have to figure out a way to do that that fits in the rules with K-State and also make sure that my department gets its fair share of what we’ve been producing so that it actually is worthwhile to put the effort into creating these courses.
That’s really the big announcement that I have. We’re kind of getting toward the middle, toward the end of the semester, so if you have any feedback or any comments, please feel free to post those on Piazza or email those to me. Also if you notice any mistakes or any issues with this class, don’t forget you’re still able to get those bug bounty extra credit points. You can also get extra credit points for helping your fellow classmates by answering Piazza posts. I’ve noticed that most Piazza posts we get are marked as private. And while that’s fine, if you’d like to ask questions in private, I also really encourage you to post those questions for public consumption just because that might help your fellow students if they have the same question or maybe they’re thinking about the same thing, it allows us to post our answers publicly so we can share those with everybody else in the class. Again, it’s totally up to you if you want to do that, but that is an option that we can follow in Piazza.
Other than that, that’s all the information I have for this week. If you have any questions, as always, you can reach me or the GTAs via Piazza. I’m also on campus usually on Wednesdays, and so you can schedule a meeting with me face to face on campus on Wednesdays, or I can always meet with you via Zoom. If you have an email from me, it’s at the bottom of the email. There’s a link for Calendly or you can contact me or you can find it on my website. But otherwise, I wish you the best of luck on the exceptions module. I wish you the best of luck on the next three modules that we’re posting. That gets to some of the more meat of object oriented programming. And I look forward to working with you through the rest of the semester. Have a good day.