What to expect

There are no formal prerequisites for this course: it is intended to be accessible to any Holy Cross student. In class work, and especially in an extended course project, you will have opportunities to contribute to the course by drawing on your own experiences and interests.

The course emphasizes hands-on work, and you are expected to be able to use a computer to follow this basic sequence of tasks on your personal computer, or the computer you are using in a lab:

1. Given a link to a text file on the internet, download the file and save it to the computer.
2. Find the saved file on the computer, and open it with a text editor.

Before our first hands-on class session on Thursday, Jan. 25, please make sure that you are comfortable doing this. If you have questions or need help, you can get help from Educational Design and Digital Media Services.

Tips

Expect to be wrong. You will try things in this course you have never tried before; you will not always succeed on your first try. That’s great! Every time you’re wrong is an opportunity to learn something, and that’s our highest course goal.

Test to find out if you’re right. Make a habit of asking ahead of time how you will determine if your solution to a problem is correct. Create a test that you can apply to your work. Apply the test before you attempt to solve a problem, and fail the test. Then try to solve the problem. If your solution passes your test, you can be confident your solution is valid.

Rewrite. Writing well always requires rewriting. This is true of your prose, and of your code. While we have to set practical deadlines when we stop rewriting, you should never expect to write something once. That’s why the second word of our embedded course theme is “forward.”

Fail early. Give yourself time to be wrong. You won’t be able to learn from our failures and rewrite your work if you are trying something for the first time just before a deadline.

Break problems down into smaller, simpler pieces. It is sometimes said that problem decomposition is the essence of computer science, but the ability to analyze complex problems in terms of smaller parts is central to scholarly thinking more generally. For example, if you wanted to compare the rhetorical style of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address with the keynote speech by Edward Everett at the Gettysburg dedication (as you will in your first lab exercise this semester), you would need to break down the idea of style into specific features. If one feature was length of sentences, you would need to break that down in to the problems of isolating sentences, and measuring their length.