15110 Principles of Computing SUMMER SESSION TWO - 2014

RESOURCES

Fast Links: Extra Help Hours | Additional Extra Help | Python | Course Tools | Additional Resources

Consult this page for extra help hours, notes on using Python, and links to learn more about the field of computing.

Extra Help Hours

SCHEDULE TO BE POSTED

Additional Extra Help

We have set up an account with Piazza, a new online tool for you to post and answer questions about course material. You should receive an email invite. Participation in Piazza is optional, and you can set the frequency of messages from Piazza individually. Some of our course assistants and the instructors are monitoring Piazza regularly. Please do NOT post assignment answers or Ruby code you are using for your assignments. The questions should be about course material or general questions about the assignments.

Academic Development on campus also offers additional tutoring services for 15-110 and other introductory courses. Visit their website for more information.

Using Python

The goal of this course is to introduce you to computational thinking and computer science, using programming principles as part of that process. This course is not a course on computer programming in and of itself. However, if you want to learn more about Python, you can follow these links for additional information:

Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3
The Python Tutorial
The Python Language Reference - for in-depth information

Course Tools

gedit - the text editor we use in lab, installers for Mac OS X and Windows are available

Python3 Downloads are available. (Look for version 3.3.2.) You do not need to download Python on your own computer to complete this course since you can use our Linux labs to do all of your work (or ssh into the andrew servers from outside the lab). But if you want to have your own installation, this link should help. Be sure to download version 3.3.2 which matches what is on the andrew machines at CMU.

On Macs, Terminal should be available in the Applications folder.

PythonLabs is a software module that accompanies the book Explorations in Computing by John Conery of the University of Oregon. The following high-level instructions are expected to work both on OS X and Windows machines. However, if you are having trouble installing PythonLabs on your local machine following these instructions you should use PythonLabs by remotely accessing the Unix/Linux servers in the Andrew domain. It is preinstalled in that domain. The instructions for remote access can be found below on this page.

1. unzip the file to obtain the directory PythonLabs-0.6.3
2. cd to the directory PythonLabs-0.6.3
3. run python3 setup.py install to install it (On Windows you can run python setup.py install through the command ( cmd ) prompt.)

Remote Access Instructions

Instructions for Electronic Handin

Light-Bot 2.0 - program the robot to solve a variety of challenges

Additional Resources

Computers and computational thinking have influenced the sciences, humanities, economics, and many other fields. With the aid of computation, many fields have made tremendous strides recently. Check out these additional resources about how computation makes a difference in the world today!