Lab 1a: Class Setup

This lab is to get all of the administrator things out of the way so that everyone is up and ready to start in this class:

This webpage

The course website is the central location of all of our communications and information about our class. This website contains the following:

  • Syllabus
  • Lecture Slides
  • Assignment Info
  • Lab Info
  • Project Info
  • Other resources

Please bookmark or other wise save this site for your references

Bcourses

Our BCourses site usage will be limited in this class to

  1. Assignment Submission
  2. Easy setup for Piazza

For all assignments, labs, and the project, you will need to go to BCourses to submit your work. For Labs, you will just need to write the world “Completed” in the text area. For assignments and the project you will paste the URL of your git repository (more on that next week)

Piazza

Our Piazza instance is our general email distribution list system where everyone can answer each other questions (usually faster than the instructors can).

Please note: please send ALL correspondence through Piazza. You can send a private note to the instructors through Piazza. This is needed because I’m not the fastest responder to email, but will respond to Piazza more quickly.

GitHub

By next week we will get everyone set up for GitHub. We will explain more later, but in short GitHub is a web service that provides git repositories to be shared. A git repository is a repository of files whose history is tracked and recorded by the version control system Git. We will talk more about this next week.

We have a GitHub organization where all of your code will be hosted for assignments and the project. Please note: you will not need to upload your labs to GitHub.

For this Lab

  • Please log into BCourses and ensure you have access to the class.
  • Please click on the Piazza navigation link in BCourses to set up your Piazza account automatically. You should see Piazza load within BCourses
  • Please send both me and Michael your GitHub username through Piazza as a private message. If you do not have a GitHub account, please create one at this link. We will add you to the GitHub Organization for this course.
  • Please wait for an email from GitHub saying you are a part of the organization.
  • If you have completed these steps and you have received that email from GitHub you have completed this lab. Please go to this link to submit via BCourses.

Above and Beyond

If y0u would like to get a jumpstart in learning more about Git, check these resources