Course Syllabus

Two fundamental rules

1. You are responsible for knowing the contents of the syllabus and all of the information about the course provided on Canvas.
2. You are responsible for knowing the contents of instructor announcements made on Canvas, which means that you should make sure you receive such announcements and that you check for new ones at least once a day.

When to email?

For all class-wide questions, we encourage you to first post on Piazza if you can't make to an office hour. Only questions of a personal nature or related to your own grade should be emailed to a TA or Instructor. If you are hesitant to ask a question on Piazza, you can always post anonymously and no one including the Instructors will know who posted it :) Remember, there are no stupid questions!

Response Times

When you email your TA or us (the instructors), you can normally expect a response within 24 hours. You should usually expect your assignments to be graded within five days of the due date. Projects 2 and 8b require more manual grading from the TAs, so they may need one additional day. Some extra time may also be needed to grade the portfolio project, due to its complexity.

Contact Information is in the "Where to go for help?" section of the Syllabus.

Canvas

Canvas is the LMS (Learning Management System) that you are using right now to view this course. For questions about Canvas, check this list of help topics Links to an external site..

Piazza

There is a link to Piazza in the left sidebar of Canvas. This ongoing Q&A forum is a valuable resource for getting official answers to your questions (and often helpful student responses also). It's good to use the search box before posting, to see if your question has already been addressed.

Slack

Slack is a forum for more informal interaction with your fellow students. It is also where TAs and I will hold office hours. Please connect to the Workspace Links to an external site. (oregonstate.enterprise.slack.com) - this is the central connection point for all OSU-oriented slack workspaces. You should then select the "Sign in with ONID" and be able to connect.

Here's how we'll use the Class Slack Workspace:

• #announcements Links to an external site.
  The landing channel when you first join. We will use this for announcements specific to Slack.
• #random Links to an external site.
  Random chat among course members (students and teachers). Bring your own memes here!
• #general Links to an external site. (You will have to join this channel manually to really get anything out of Slack)
  Class-specific discussions, office hours, etc.

On Slack you can:

• Create your own channels
  For group-work or study-groups you can create your own (private or public) channels!
• Create ad-hoc teleconference sessions
  Click the "phone" icon next to the channel title and invite people to join you!
• Engage with the TAs and Instructor during office hours
• Engage with each other

OSU's primary motivation in providing this Slack experience is to give you, the student, a built-in mechanism for building relationships and collaborations among yourselves.

PyCharm

PyCharm is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that you will use in this course to develop your assignments. There are a few steps you'll need to follow to get PyCharm set up on your computer:

1. Download and install the current version of Python 3, found here Links to an external site..
2. Download and install the Community edition of PyCharm, found here Links to an external site..
3. Run PyCharm and answer the setup questions (accept the default if you aren't sure). When you reach the welcome screen, click on "Create New Project". You should now see this screen:
   
4. In the "Location" path, replace "untitled" with "greeting". This will be the name of your project.
5. Click on the little arrow to the left of "Project Interpreter". You should now see the following:
   
6. Click on "Existing interpreter" and select whatever version of Python 3 you installed. PyCharm will remember this choice as the default for future projects (which is good, since Python 3 is what we'll use throughout the course).   [If the Python 3 interpreter you installed doesn't appear,  open the Settings/Preferences dialog, select Project <project name> | Project Interpreter, click the  icon and select Add.  Next select System Interpreter and then select your installation of Python 3.]  You should now see this screen:
   
7. Near the top of the left pane, right-click on the project folder ("greeting"), select "New/Python File", and name the new file "greeting.py". In your new document, type the following: print("Hello world.")
8. Right-click anywhere on the document and select "Run 'greeting'" (which has a little green triangle icon to its left). This should make "Hello world." print to the output window. Congratulations - you've just created and run a program in Python!
9. Click on "Python Console" at the bottom left of your screen. This changes the bottom window from an output window to a console window, where you can use Python commands interactively. Try entering in this window the same print command that you put in your program. Interactive mode is handy for trying out simple things quickly, but for more complex things it's easier to write a program (or "script" as they're often called in interpreted languages such as Python). If you run your program again, the bottom window will switch back to showing the output of your program.

GitHub

GitHub is a popular web hosting service for Git repositories. Git is a distributed version control system that makes it easy to keep backups of different versions of your code and track changes that are made to it. You'll be using GitHub to host your assignment code. The assignment page in Canvas will contain a GitHub invitation link for each coding project. When you accept that invitation, GitHub will create a repository for you for that project. Your project's repository contains all of your project's files and stores each file's revision history. You can clone these repositories and then commit and push updates to them from within PyCharm. Cloning a repository creates a local copy of it. Committing a change updates your local copy. Pushing a change updates your repository on GitHub.

Install Git:

1. Download Links to an external site. and install Git.
2. In the Settings/Preferences dialog of PyCharm, select Version Control | Git in the left pane and specify the path to the Git executable.

Use PyCharm to clone your repository from GitHub:

1. From the welcome screen, choose Checkout from Version Control | Git.
2. In the Clone Repository dialog, specify the URL of the remote repository you want to clone (there are detailed steps on the Assignment 1 page).  You can click Test to make sure that connection to the remote can be established.
3. In the Directory field, specify the path where the folder for your local Git repository will be created into which the remote repository will be cloned (you can use the default path provided).
4. Click Clone. To create a PyCharm project based on the sources you have cloned, click Yes in the confirmation dialog.

Use PyCharm to commit and push changes:

1. To invoke the Commit Changes dialog, select the files (or an entire changelist) in the Local Changes view (in the Version Control tab in the lower left) and click on the toolbar (or right-click and choose Commit Changes). The Commit Changes dialog lists all files that have been modified since the last commit, and all newly added unversioned files.
2. Enter a commit message. You can click to choose from the list of recent commit messages.
3. From the Commit drop-down selection choose "Commit and Push".  Then in the pane that pops up, confirm the Push.  
4. From the Commit drop-down selection choose "Commit and Push".  Then in the pane that pops up, confirm the Push.  Make sure that you commit and push.  If you just commit, that will only update your local copy of the repository, not the copy on GitHub.  The push is what updates the copy on GitHub.

GradeScope

At the bottom of each assignment page is a link to Gradescope, which will open in a new tab. On Gradescope you'll be able to click a link to submit your projects from GitHub.

Repl.it

Repl.it is the tool that was used to create the interactive exercises in the lessons. The exercises are embedded in the lesson pages in Canvas, but you will need to be logged into Repl.it in order to view them. You'll receive an invitation to join the Repl.it "classroom" around the first day of class.