Friday, January 16, 2008
We continued our discussion of the course, our philosophy of teaching and learning, and various logistical issues.
The Course Website and Course Rules
It is important that you visit the course website regularly, particularly the announcements and assignments pages. See rules on the logistics page for more details.
Grading
From the class website.
Special Note on Professional Points
How to accumulate professional points.
How to Work With Variable Backgrounds
We are interested in helping students learn regardless of background.
Professionalism
We will continue to stress the aspect of professionalism in this class. There are many aspects to being a professional. Just a few are listed here.
- You take an active interest in learning that extends beyond the parameters of specific assignments.
- You regularly identify topics or issues related to your chosen field of study or interest and attempt to learn about them in some detail regardless of whether they are course related or not.
- You are willing to help your peers learn if you know something you don't.
- You are willing to learn from your peers if they know something that you don't.
- Learning is not a competition; it is a collaboration. You acknowledge when you do not understand something and you share your knowledge when you do.
The Ever-Growing Programming Language Toolbox
From simple programming languages with few tools (e.g. one rudimentary IF statement, as was in the early versions of the FORTRAN programming language to multiple decision statement tools as found in modern programming languages, including if-then, if-then-else, if-then-elseif-elseif...else, and switch statements.
It is very nice to have specialized tools to apply to specific problems. It also implies that there are a lot more things to learn about modern programming languages.
The Ever-Changing Nature of Computing and Problem Solving
Multi-core computers--what are they and what does that imply for programmers? The answers lie in threaded programming and concurrency, new topics that we will introduce in this class.
The First Assignment
- your picture for the Rogues Gallery
- ensuring that you are ready to program, with BlueJ or Eclipse installed on your personal computer (if that is what you use for your programming assignments)