HW 0 (Getting Started)

This is an individual assignment. You are welcome to discuss any part of the assignment with classmates, course staff or Anna. For Part 3 (the programming activity), make sure to cite any help you receive in the "acknowlegdements" portion of the assignment.

This assignment is due at 10PM on Wednesday, April 1.

• Log into Moodle: log into our course Moodle page. Class materials, readings, and homework will be posted here.
• Complete Monday's pre-class tasks: If you haven't yet, complete Monday's pre-class tasks: reading the syllabus, filling out the background survey and logging into Ed, our Q&A platform.
• Optional, but recommended: Set up your computer for development

In class we'll frequently use a tool on the computers called "command line". Back in the old days (1960s-70s), computers didn't have the fancy displays they do now. Instead, monitors could only show text with 80 characters per line and 25 lines on the screen. As a result, anytime you wanted to do anything, you had to type commands onto the computer screen. For instance (I'm making up syntax here, but the general idea holds), "run chrome" could open up Google Chrome in the background, and then "search Carleton College" could perform a Google search for Carleton.

Fortunately, we now have nice graphical displays on our computers, but for certain tasks, using command line is much easier than using the mouse-and-graphics interface.

To complete this part of the assignment, log into one of the CS lab machines in Olin 310 or 308. You can also run these instructions on your own computer, but not that they're written for Mac. Certain details differ when working with command line in Windows, so these exact instructions won't work.

After logging in, open VSCode and mount the courses drive (follow these instructions). In VSCode, you should be in a new window. If not, go to the File menu and select New Window. Then, go to your student work folder in the Finder (go to the CS111-01-26SP folder, then to the StuWork, then to the folder with your username). Create a new folder within that folder called hw0 by going to the File menu and selecting New Folder. Drag this new folder onto a new window in VSCode. Then, go to the Terminal menu in VSCode and select New Terminal.

Your VSCode window will now look something like this:

To double check that everything is correct, click next to the % or $ on the bottom part of the window (whether this is symbol is % or $ just depends on the exact computer you're on), type pwd, and press enter.

Your prompt will look a little different, instead of InstructorWork you should see StuWork/username where username is your Carleton username. If you don't see something printed that starts with /Volumes/COURSES/CS111-01-26SP/StuWork/ and then has your username and hw0, then something has gone wrong. Try again, or reach out for help. If you see COURSES-1 instead of COURSES, that is fine.

We call the area following the $ or % the command line. You just typed pwd at the prompt. This command, short for "print working directory" prints the path of the directory you are currently in (i.e., the "address" of your current folder on the computer).

Now, go through Typographical Conventions, Introduction to UNIX Operating System, and Tutorials 1-3 of this tutorial. The tutorials were originally created over 25 years ago, but they're still accurate-enough for us. A few notes and minor discrepancies are:

• The ls command is shorthand for "list". Thus, it's the lowercase letter l, then the letter s. Adding this note because the number 1 and lowercase l look identical in the tutorial's font.
• The final character of the prompt on the tutorial is %. For us, this will be $ or % depending on the computer.
• We'll generally start a Terminal session directly in VSCode. The Intro to UNIX portion of the tutorial describes opening the standalone terminal app which also works, it just doesn't bring to your current folder the way that the VSCode terminal does.

For this part of the assignment, you will hand in the biglist file that you create in Exercise 3a.

This part of the assignment has two purposes. First, I want you to practice writing code, since that's what we'll be doing the rest of the term! And second, I want to familiarize everyone with the mechanics of assignments will work in this class. This includes file formatting, assignment submission on Gradescope, and understanding the autograder on Gradescope.

Before getting started, I want to remind you that this course's policy is that you cannot use search engines or generative AI (including the Copilot extension in VSCode) when working on homework assignments. You may, however, use and cite the official Python documentation.

File: hello.py
Author: Ada Lovelace
Purpose: Implements Assignment 0 (asks a user for their name and age and then 
          greets them)

Acknowledgements
Alan Turing (lab assistant) helped me find the documentation for print() 
Schiller explained to me that the Autograder checks for spacing so I need to 
         adjust how I use print

Reflections
Part 2 of the assignment took me a long time because at first I wasn't being thorough at following
the instructions. But then the coding part of the assignment was pretty easy because I looked at 
my notes from class and got help as explained above. 
I spent 3 hours on this assignment.

File: hello.py
Author: Grace Hopper
Purpose: Assignment 0

Acknowledgements
I worked alone, but looked Runestone 2.15 was helpful for reminding me how input() works. 

Reflections
I started the assignment late and so I felt rushed to finish it on time. It was hard to 
figure out that I needed to call int() on the user input but once I did that it went ok. 
Next time I should start earlier so that it's less stressful!
I spent 2 hours on this assignment.

Hello there!
What is your first name? Lulu
What is your last name? Amert
How old are you, in years? 13

Have a great day, Lulu Amert!
You are approximately 4745 days old.

Hello there!
What is your first name? Cheddar
What is your last name? Amert
How old are you, in years? 1

Have a great day, Cheddar Amert!
You are approximately 365 days old.