CMPSC 220 - Allegheny College - Spring 2009
I have posted the slides to my 99 Things lecture online. It is behind the protected portion of the site because the pictures I used are not in the public domain/Creative Commons. When I revise the slides, I will fix this problem, and then the slides will be freely distributable.
For now, they fall under fair use, and to that end, I will distribute them to you only. Please do not distribute them further at this time. (Not that I expect you would, but I thought I'd mention it.)
Foad Mozaffari is a visiting professor over in Art, and he does some cool things at the intersection of art and technology. He says:
My advanced class is showing programing based interactive work that was done with Processing. They involve camera tracking and some simple button interfaces. I thought it might be interesting to your students.
It should be good times. Tuesday (tomorrow), 7PM to 9PM in Campus Center 209-206 and Doane Hall. Poster below.
As promised, I have distilled the content of our discussion regarding CMPSC 220. My goal is to capture your suggestions as to how the course can be improved, and revisit those suggestions before this course is offered again—if nothing else, so that future generations of students will not suffer as you have.
I believe feedback is a conversation. If you feel that your thoughts or ideas are not adequately captured by this document, help me better understand how I can improve CMPSC 220 in your view. (Or, it is possible you already have communicated this through the RSEs, which are safely anonymous. I will read them carefully, and reflect any messages I see there into this document, I assure you.)
(Image CC licensed by jiscinfonet.)
I've got team pictures online. I threw them in a gallery under the password protected portion of the site. It was the easiest thing I could do.
Note the snowman is not a CMPSC 220 team, but he was chillaxing on the porch on my walk into work that day.
I've uploaded an 11x17 poster template (cmpsc220-poster-template.odp) to the protected area of the course website.
Ideally, if you can email me your poster by the end of Tuesday, I think that will give the print shop time to run them. (Put another way, I'll walk into the shop Wednesday morning when they open.)
I found that there is very little space on an 11x17 poster. Once you include a diagram or two (screenshot, whatever the case may be), there is very little room for text. You should find that filling the poster isn't the problem, but finding room for what you do want to say might be problematic.
I'll be uploading (to the protected area of the site—they will not be on the Interwebs at large) team pictures that I've taken so far. Emails will ensue.
A new MiniLab is up. We'll dive into that on Friday. I assure you, this is one of the most exciting MiniLabs yet. To make sure, I gave it to Matthew to test out before turning you loose on it:
Hm. Well. Perhaps you will find it more engaging. I may, you know, have over-sold the level of excitement this MiniLab might bring... but wait! What Matthew needed to get him into it was music. How could I forget?!
Clearly, I need to reach back to those great songs of academia from years past. There once was a song about exciting labs, right?
Your lab, is better than chocolate
Better than anything else that I've tried
Oh labs are better than chocolate
Everyone here can now start to cry
The Scheme minilab has been added to the Labs portion of the site. This will be the source of our activity in class ... er, tomorrow. But just barely tomorrow, given when this is being posted.
I've updated my calendar.
In particular, I've clearly marked PHONE/IM hours.
Policy has not changed. You may still call my mobile phone anytime you have questions; I still turn it off when I'm sleeping.
You ARE ABSOLUTELY STILL ENCOURAGED TO CALL. I am happy to scoot back up the hill to meet with you if the phone is inadequate for the purpose of answering whatever question(s) you may have.
What I've done is convert "office hours" into "phone hours." This is because Matthew is growing very rapidly (he has gained between 1 and 2oz per day since the start of his second week), and therefore eating lots. For this reason, I'm going to work hard to come home in the afternoons as much as possible. Without someone to console Matthew and get him to sleep between feedings, Carrie is getting too little sleep, and will soon keel over from exhaustion. This would be bad.
So I will not be hanging around the office in the afternoons. The majority of my meetings with all of you throughout the semester have been by appointment (outside of "office hours") anyway. So, this should not effect anything.
I want to have at least one more meeting with everyone before the end of the semester. Perhaps this is like an oral exam. Or, perhaps it is a chance for me to see what you've learned. Either way, it will be a chance for me to see what you've taken away from the interpreter labs (Substitution, the Extended Interpreter, and the Object-Oriented Interpreter).
We will schedule these 1-hour meetings during lab on Thursday of this week.
I should have been more clear/detailed regarding our visitor this Friday!
At the end of the week, Professor Emeritus Allen Tucker from Bowdoin College is being hosted by the Allegheny ACM chapter (remember? JOIN THE ACM). Allen is involved both in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development project, co-author of Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms, and the editor of the Computer Science Handbook. He will be our guest in class Friday; my hope is that you are prepared either to engage in some interesting discussion about languages, or be entertained by whatever comes to pass.
In other news, I continue to get little sleep. If I've managed to prepare material to further your education, my hope is that you'll be there to benefit from what opportunities I can provide.
See you at 10.
Four things, all brief:
1. I have updated the To Do page a few times in the last few days, mostly because I keep realizing that I've screwed things up. I think it is now accurate, until I change it again.
2. I would appreciate it if you read two articles for Friday. They're not scholarly works, but thought-pieces by language developers and researchers who have been in the game for a long time. The essential question we will discuss and debate is simple: should language choice matter in your software projects?
3. Allen Tucker will be giving a talk at 3:30 on Friday, and I would encourage you all to attend. (See flyers in Alden Hall.) In fact, if you cannot attend, I'd appreciate it if you speak to me as to why. (Consider this "mandatory" in some relatively non-enforceable way, except you really should go.)
4. Allen Tucker may be our guest in CMPSC 220 on Friday. This may, or may not, change our plans for Friday's class. Come prepared to be flexible; he may expect you to have read the articles I've pointed you at already, so be prepared.
