Welcome and first week info¶
Posted: 1/8/21
Hello CMSE802 Students,
The beginning of the semester is upon us. First off, I want to acknowledge the intense state of everything: from an uncontrolled pandemic to government instability, from lack of access to child and parental care, to a world awakening to how inherent sexism, racism, and ableism exacerbate inequalities in our institutions. It can be truly difficult to learn or focus on anything right now. But together, we will all try to learn something new. My promise to you is flexibility and understanding in this difficult time and all I ask is that you give the same generosity in return, both to me and to your fellow learners. The ongoing isolation has affected us all in different ways and all we can do is try to be patient with each other as we work through everything in our own way.
Onwards to the technicalities!
- Our class website is here, I will post all announcements there. For instance, you should be receiving this message both through email as well as seeing it posted on the announcements page
- Our first class will be Wednesday, Jan 20th at 8:30am.
- The class will be held every Monday and Wednesday at this zoom link. You must be logged into your MSU zoom account to join the meeting.
There are a few things you can get started on before Wednesday to make our first day go quite a bit smoother.
- Find the D2L page and make sure you have access to our class.
- Take a look at the syllabus where you can find the basic policies for the class (warning! Still under construction!)
- Join the CMSE department's course slack and join the
#cmse802-s21 channel there for our class
- Install jupyter via anaconda, instructions in html here, downloadable jupyter notebook file here, or get access to the college of engineering's jupyterhub.
- If you are using your local machine rather than jupyterhub (what this means is explained in the getting started guide), get git setup on your machine and work through part one of this tutorial.
- If everything is successful, by the time class starts Wednesday morning you should be able to:
- Clone this repo to your machine or to jupyterhub, which will be where all assignments are posted for the rest of the semester. As of today, it only contains a readme file, but will have more content soon.....
- Sometime next week I'll have the first jupyter notebook included in that repo (many apologies, it's not quite ready yet!) which you should be able to load. We will work through that notebook in class.
- Need help??? Don't worry, this is a lot to take in. The easiest place to reach me is through the slack channel. If you can't get that up and running, email is also fine. And, of course, if you don't have everything up and running by Wednesday we are dedicating some time there to getting everyone into a working state.
I'm sure I'm forgetting something and more info will be forthcoming, but hopefully this will get you started. Please enjoy having an extra week of rest and I'll see you all on the 20th!
-Liz