Introductions


This assignment is meant to introduce you to your classmates and the course staff. It also helps to ensure that you can contact the course staff if you need to in the future by letting you post a message to the bulletin board.

Tools Used within the Course

In addition to this website, we will use two other tools during the semester: a bulletin board and a programming environment.

Bulletin Board

The bulletin board is a place for you to ask questions that can be answered by any of the course staff or even other students. This system is a much more efficient system for getting your questions answered than emailing one specific person or even waiting for an over-burdened TA during office hours. To make sure you can use the bulletin board system, please post a biography of a famous computer scientist to the bulletin board category titled Introductions in the forum CompSci 6 - Spring 2005.

To do this, you will need to register yourself on the bulletin board. Please use your Net ID as your bulletin board login, but do not use your actual Net ID password for the bulletin board. Instead please create a new password for this site. By using your Net ID as your login, you will help us to more quickly get more information if we need it to answer your question.

Programming Environment

Eclipse is an integrated programming environment that makes writing, compiling, and running Java programs easier.  You do not need it to write java programs; if you wanted, you could write java programs in Microsoft Word and then compile and run them separately at the DOS prompt. Eclipse is called an integrated environment because it combines several programs like a text editor, compiler, and debugger into one single program. Additionally, it has several features to aid in creating programs like highlighting important words, automating certain tasks, pointing out syntactic errors in your program, and even offering suggestions for fixes. Additionally, you will use Eclipse to submit your assignments.

To use Eclipse, you will need to use the computers in the ICC lab or download Eclipse to your local machine. Once you have done that, follow these instructions to create a project for submission:

Assignment Requirements

To introduce you to these tools, you will complete three activities: two to introduce you to the history of Computer Science and one to help the course staff get to know you better.

Famous Biography

Here is list of famous computer scientists and a homemade video about them . According to the directions given on that page, post a paragraph about your assigned computer scientist to the bulletin board and submit your iden. In addition to your own words, include links to at least two web pages containing different content relating to their contribution.

Computing Autobiography

Since computers are now so pervasive in society, everyone should have a variety of experiences using or programming them (or being victims of software). Before you start this course, take a moment to reflect on how these experiences have affected you and shaped your decision to program (and to take this course).

Your autobiography should attempt to answer the following questions:


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