CSC 282.01, Class 14: Wrapup

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Upcoming work
  • Good things to do
• Goals
• Debrief
• Apologies
• Acknowledgement of seniors
• Evaluation forms

Upcoming work

• None! You’re done. You pass (at least if you’re here to read this message).

Good things to do

• CS Extra Today: Cool Algorithms!
• CSC 321 presentations tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. (with refreshments)
• Take a deep breath.
• Let it out, please.

Questions

Goals

• Stupid, ad-hoc lectures on the things you should know.
• A class about thinking and process
  • You need to play with ideas in your language and environment.
  • You will do things wrong.
  • Even if you don’t know the particulars, you should know the general kinds of things that are available so that you know what you should play with.
  • What makes you successful as a computer scientist is not spelling. It’s that you can learn new tools and figure out new ways to apply them.
• As a C programmer, you have to think about the machine state.
• New ideas in C
  • Macros and their use.
  • A little about gdb.
  • A bit about malloc
  • …
• New ideas in Unix
  • Makefiles
  • A bunch of tools (sed, tr, grep, find, bash, …)

Debrief

Think / Pair / Share

1. Think: Take three minutes to think about two or three items for each of the following …

2. Pair: Chat about your answers with someone nearby and come up with your best answers.

3. Share: Report back to the class.

Something that went well in the class

• Lectures.
• The “readings”.
• The eboards.
• Lenient “on time” policy (not so good for classmates).
• Everything: In class, out of class, well being.
• Out of class work.
• Group activities built community.

Something you would change to make it better

• Rename it to “Storytime with Sam”, since that’s what it is.
• (Many) fewer really bad jokes ; more good jokes.
• AI spellchecker while Spam types.
• Provide more contextual information.
• Keep the Web site updated, particularly the links.
• Don’t violate FERPA. (If you are an administrator: That was a joke.)
• Need MUCH MORE out-of-class work.
• Organize the class: Have assignments ready on time.
• Keep the louder students quieter.
• More readings. More formal readings.
• More hands-on work.
• Don’t start at a time like 8:00 a.m.
• Reinforcement. (MUCH MUCH MORE work.)
• Build on the work we do in class / check on what we do.
• Nothing as big as the idiotic arbitrary-length integers, but more small assignments.
  • But having to get everything together was nice, so perhaps keep it smaller.
• Actually teach bash.
• Teach git.

Something important you learned

• Putting together an API for a C project.
• A bit more on using bash, or bashing people, or something similar.
• Use parentheses when making macros.
• Makefiles.
• vim looks super useful, but your brain will hurt for much too long. It has a bad learning curve. But maybe I’ll try vim with Dvorak.
• gdb and valgrind.
• A bit about regular expresions.
• Navigating through Unix with commands (e.g., pushd, popd, command-line history, etc.)

Apologies

Or how you know that Sam is an idiot.

• I should have had the readings ready.
• I should have had (more) assignments.
• It was not a good semester for me and I apologize.

Acknowledgement of seniors

• You made Grinnell better.
• Thank you for being here.
• Good luck in the future.

Evaluation forms

You know the drill.