📝 Course Information - studyguide & how to engage with this course

🚀How to get started

While its a lot to take in, take the following steps to get started!

Get familair with the course site & course structure:

• Navigate to the Home Page to understand the purpose of the course and the learning goals you are expected to achieve.
• Read this page to learn how to follow the course - how to engage with the material and how the course is set up.
• Get Slack. In the website menu, go to the webpage "Communication & Slack". Learn how we communicate during this course and follow the steps to set up Slack.
• Navigate to "Content Overview", to get an overview of the full course.
• Navigate to "Week 1 - Foundations of Computer Science" and get started.

🔍Course Overview

📚 How to engage with the material

How to complete a week

For each week, there will be PDFs to read, videos to watch (with accompanying slides) and tutorials.

Only engaing with part of the material won't provide the full course experience—each component is designed to complement the others.

1. Read PDFs & watch videos
2. Follow tutorials
3. Download software & create accounts (if necessary)
4. Complete examination

📖 Reading

The course provides PDFs for reading material. They have more detailed and expanded information. These texts have been written to be thorough, explaining topics in a way to give you an overview and understanding of the topics without using overly technical language. They might seem long, but please don't be intimidated! This is because they are so explanatory, and try to describe difficult concept in a way that beginners might understand. They also pictures to help visually provide insight into the topics explored.

📺 Videos

The videos will give you a broad understanding and might contextualize and explain difficult concepts, while the PDFs provide comprehensive details and extensive coverage of the topics. Videos will be more general and conversational, with a relaxed tone, focusing on explaining the topics and providing context, rather than going through the text provided point by point.

🖥️ Tutorials

The tutorials are designed for you to follow along with. Open videos in a window, and in antoher window, replicate the actions as demonstrated. Follow along step by step as you watch. Replay steps if necessary! NOTE! I have a Windows computer, and while I will be working with GitBash, which is available for macOS AND Windows (with Linux commands), things might look different for you if you have a Mac or use Linux!

🖥️ Downloads & Accounts

In this course, you’ll be asked to download software to prepare for the fall semester and get acquainted with the tools you'll need. Make sure to follow the instructions carefully to install the necessary programs and set up your environment. You will also need to create accounts on GitHub and Replit to engage with the course material effectively. The accounts will be private and solely for your use, allowing you to manage your projects and maintain your work efficiently.

🖋️ Examination

The examination is meant to be fairly easy, with a majority of the requirements already demonstrated in the tutorials. The idea of this course is to get your feet wet!

If you are having issues with the examination, look at the tutorial for that topic, and ask your fellow students. Chances are that the tutorial demonstrates steps you should take (with minor adjustments).

The examination is meant to give you a practical element to practice, and a guide on what to start practicing on. The hand in is an opportunity for you to get feedback - not completing an examination will not affect your grade or the courses for the fall. It's meant to offer guidelines on what to work on, provide opportunities to download and familiarize yourself with upcoming software, and give you feedback to help you understand what you might need to work at.

The examination will be handed in in Github. For this course the examination will consist of either imagefiles of screenshots OR text uploaded to Github.