Lab assignments

Collaboration

In the first section of the course, you will work in small teams to complete a series of hands-on lab assignments. Based on responses to the initial course survey (due Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 12:00), you will be assigned to a team for the first three lab assignments, including students from both BIO 199 and CLAS 199. Each team will complete a work contract, and bring a signed copy of the contract to class on Tuesday, Jan. 30.

For the fourth lab assignment, you will work in a group formed from students in CLAS 199. This group will also complete a work contract and turn in a signed copy.

Format

For each lab assigment, you will be given a template Pluto notebook to work from. The template notebook includes some provided scaffolding sections, and other sections you will need to complete. You will submit each lab assignment by adding a copy of your completed notebook to your personal folder on the Google course drive. For more detail, see the instructions for each assignment (linked below).

Common structure

All four lab assignments have a common outline, that could be summarized as:

  1. define the goal or problem you want to solve
  2. break down and identify specific subproblems to achieve the goal of the assignment. For each subproblem,
    1. define a test to assess whether your solution is value. Note that your test should initially fail!
    2. successfully implement a solution to the subproblem, and verify your success by passing your test(s).
  3. complete a prompted reflection on the assingment

Instructions for assignments

  1. rhetorical style in the Gettysburg Address (modeling texts)
  2. comparing sequences in DNA (classifying species)
  3. linguistic evolution (evaluating evolutionary trees based on parsimony)
  4. comparing English translations of the Bible (working with a “bag of words” model of text)

Revising assignments

Please follow these instructions

Table of contents

Classics 199, Papyrus to Pixels. All material on this web site is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0 on github.