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Class 1: An introduction to CSC 321

Held: Monday, 23 January 2017

We look at the “big picture” of the course.

Preliminaries

Updates

News / Etc.

  • Welcome back! I think I know most of you, and I’m happy to be able to teach you again.
  • But I’m still taking attendance.
  • CS Table Tuesday!
  • CS Extras Thursday: Research opportunities at Grinnell.
  • I switched my course building tools and do not yet have the course site ready. Cross your fingers that it will be up soon.

Upcoming Work

What is this course?

Broad-based overview of software engineering, with a focus on Agile methodologies. We ground learning in the Ruby on Rails platform.

Course goals

From your perspective, what is “the subject matter of this course”? That is, what do you expect to see covered in the course?

  • Write down five things.
  • Share with a partner.
  • Then share with the larger class.

Why this course?

Why are you taking this course? (If your answer is “Because I have to”, think about why we offer this course.)

Course structure

  • Skim the syllabus.
  • Do you see everything you expect to learn? What’s left out?
  • What surprises you about the syllabus?
  • What questions do you have?

Time for setup

Sign up for accounts on

a. http://github.com

b. http://edge.edx.org

c. http://www.edx.org

d. http://grinnell-cs.slack.com

e. http://c9.io

f. https://www.codecademy.com/

g. https://trello.com/

h. https://www.heroku.com/

Start the Codecademy Ruby Tutorial.

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ruby