 Hello and welcome to CSC 131, Introduction to Computer Science. I'll be your instructor this semester. My name is Adam Gawida. You can call me Adam, Mr. Gawida, Mr. G. I really don't really care. You know, when you're out in the real world, you don't actually kind of call your bosses Mr. Smith. It's weird. Anyways, I just wanted to kind of give you guys a quick little introduction to the course. You know, one of the things you might be noticing is I've got this nice beautiful green screen behind me. And so what's actually going to happen is every lecture, every week, I'm going to go ahead and also record the lecture inside of my own little studio that I've got going on here. And that way, if you ever miss sort of our lecture classes, you're not completely out of luck. You know, that sucks, especially since computer programming and computer science can be such a difficult concept. It would really hurt you to miss a class and then not have any material ready for you to kind of pick up on. So that's one of the things that I'll actually be doing for us. Since I'm talking about that, one of the ways that we're going to be structuring this class is the first class time that we meet up every week. That's actually going to be lecture. So I'll spend the time, I'll lecture about the concept that we might do it in class a few times if we can get the chance. But then the second time we meet up, I'm actually going to open that up to just work on the assignments. The reason why I do this is because, again, I understand that computer science is a very difficult concept. And so one of the things I think that can be beneficial to you guys is to actually have someone who is a computer scientist, who knows the programming language, who is experienced in it, to be there with you when you're trying to figure these things out. I know I would have loved to have that when I was learning this stuff. And so I think it is one of those kind of, I'm now acting more as a coach than just kind of whatever. One of the other things is that we're going to have three different styles of assignments. That isn't to say you have three assignments each week and you're done. I give a lot of work. If you've checked my rate, my professor, it's one of the ones. But what we're going to have is these three different styles. Typing exercises, lecture exercises, and problem sets. Now, typing exercises. These are pretty much just like you would do in any sporting activity. Before you run, you stretch. Before you maybe play basketball, you throw a few free throws just to get kind of in the mood. Get into the rhythm of being in that activity. And so the typing exercises, what I feel they're going to do is they're going to benefit you by training your neuromuscular memory to understand this is what I'd need to do with a for loop. This is what I need to do when I need to build a dictionary. Things of that nature. The lecture exercises are pretty much going to be your traditional multiple choice style questions. True, false, fill in the blank style questions. I'm going to ask a question about a concept that we covered that week. You're going to give an answer to it. Those aren't terribly, terribly difficult. Those are mostly to just ensure that, yes, I was paying attention. I do understand the content. And then finally, we've got the problem set. The problem set is going to be the meat and potatoes of this entire class. You're going to spend a lot of time on that. So much time that here's the professor kind of mourning in the beginning of class. Don't wait until the last day. Don't wait until the night before it's due to attempt to do it. You will fail the class. My assignments are not, you know, make a print statement, print hello five times. That doesn't give you kind of that world of computer science. That's just teaching you programming. So what we're going to be doing a lot of times in these problem sets is actually looking at real world kind of applications. So, you know, calculating out things like standard deviation, implementing collision detection, things of that nature. So it is going to be a little bit more on that difficult side. Again, if you ever get stuck, that's why we're going to have these videos available to you. And one of the other little notes is we will not actually have a textbook for this class, which is nice because your wallet will thank you later. But the other reason is because one of the beautiful things about computer science is it's all available on the internet. You are going to learn to love a website known as stackoverflow.com. Take a look on there now if you want. Don't use Yahoo answers, but that's more personal preference. But what I am going to give is I will actually give you guys, let me pull them up, some nice little websites. And this is kind of how you'll actually see the screen kind of work a lot of times. But you're going to see this page. How to think like a computer scientist. And then on top of that, computer science circles. I might kind of point out you should run through these as well. The reason why is because something like how to think like a computer scientist. It's going to give us Python. But one of the beautiful things about this book is let's just say I go to variables. Well, it's got its own little videos. But as we scroll down, it actually has code for us. So I can run this code. And it's actually going to explain everything out so I can walk through. It's going to give me all of the different little tidbits that I can work from. And you can continue to go through these a few times. And they even have their own little kind of end of chapter questionnaires. If you get kind of deeper into them, say for example, order of operations maybe. Some of the different pages. Let's just come down to maybe functions. You can see that you actually get into more and more complex style code. So it is kind of very beneficial to you guys. I encourage you all to kind of go to these websites and practice them on your own time. But other than that, pretty much welcome to class. I hope that you guys all are excited and I'll see you guys in class.