CMSE401: Week 1 class preparation checklist

Due to COVID-19 pandemic the first week of the Spring 2021 semester will be used for reading, review and semester preparation. To this end, it is recommended that all students complete the following tasks before showing up for the first day of class.

Watch Welcome Video and Review Syllabus
Complete background survey
Get Jupyter Working
Review Git
Complete Pre-class Assignment

1. Watch Welcome Video and Review Syllabus

To start, I suggest that you watch the following video and review the course Syllabus. Note that this video is much longer than most of the videos you will find in the class. You will probably be fine if you speed up the video and you can probably just listen to most of it.

Welcome video

Course Syllabus

2. Complete background survey

Students in CMSE401 come from a variety of backgrounds. To help the instructor adjust the curriculum and provide support to all students in this course please fill out the following on-line survey:

CMSE401 Background Survey

3. Get Jupyter Working

We will be using Jupyter notebooks for most of our student/instructor communication. Please attend class with the latest version of Anaconda Python installed on your computer (Anaconda includes Jupyter). Instructions for installing and using Anaconda and Jupyter can be found here:

0000–Jupyter-Getting-Started-Guide.html

As a backup, all students are also given accounts on the MSU jupyterhub servers http://jupyterhub.egr.msu.edu and http://jupyterhub-legacy.egr.msu.edu. Make sure you follow the directions in the above “getting started guide” and ensure that you can login. It is recommended that students primarily use the jupyterhub server and only switch to jupyterhub-lagacy if there is a problem (please notify your instructors anytime there is a problem).

4. Review Git

In this class we assume that everyone knows how to use git. All course materials will be downloaded using the course git repository and class projects will be submitted to the instructor using git. The instructor realizes that git is a fairly complex tool and has provided the following tutorial as a reference.

Getting to know git (Tutorial)

Please review the above tutorial (especially the sections about consuming and producing git repositories) and make sure you can download and use the course repository:

Course Git Repository

5. Complete Pre-class Assignment

You are expected to come to class ready to complete the in-class assignments. To prepare for most classes, students are required to complete pre-class assignments (typically two pre-class assignments per week). These assignments will be in the form of jupyter notebooks and will include reading, videos and programming activities. The required time for each pre-class will vary but the instructor has tried to make them take approximately 30-minutes.

Each pre-class assignment ends with an online survey which students are required to complete in order to earn credit for the assignment. Your first weeks assignments are available on the course git repository or downloadable from the course website. At a minimum, you must complete the first pre-class assignment by 11:59pm on Tuesday January 19th.

If you are feeling productive you may also want to consider reviewing the course schedule and assignments. Your instructor has already posted some future assignments to allow you to get a head start. For example, everyone should be able to start the first homework and be thinking about what they want to do for their semester projects:

Written by Dr. Dirk Colbry, Michigan State University
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.