Governor's Career & Technical Academy Arlington

CSC 208 Weekly Goals and Tasks: Week 1

CSC 208

Overview

This course will be a big change from last semester, where we spent our time learning a new programming language. This semester we will hardly be programming at all (we'll do a few things to show us how Python can help with discrete math, but not much), and you will wonder how you ended up on what will really be another math class, when you thought you had signed-up for computer science.

Computer science is still a relatively new discipline, and even some of those most intimately involved with it are not entirely sure what it is (see your homework assignment). Whatever it is, it is certainly connected with mathematics, particularly discrete mathematics, which concerns itself with operations on the set of natural numbers.

That's what we will be studying this semester, so welcome to CSC 208: Introduction to Discrete Structures!

Tuesday, February 3rd

We'll begin with a hands-on activity to git us ready for the workflow we will use to submit work in this class, and end with a homework assignment that asks us to think about what we will doing in this course.

The classwork is due at the end of the period, so don't waste time gitting to it! ;-)

Classwork

  1. Create a new git repo for this class on your favorite git host, and email me its URL. Name your repo csc208.
  2. Add a .gitignore to your repo to assure that artifacts like .DS_Store don't end up in your repo. You will lose a letter grade this semester on repo evaluation assignments if I see such things.
  3. Add a subdirectory to your repo named ch0_preliminaries.
  4. Take a look at each of the following Markdown files, viewing their source to see how they are written:
  5. Add a Markdown file in your ch0_prelimaries directory named latex_experiments1.md. Find interesting examples of adding math notation to Markdown from the list above (or other places, if you're feeling really ambitious), and use them to add your own remixes to this document.

Homework / Evaluation

Read I'm not a real scientist, and that's okay. In the ch0_preliminaries subdirectory in your git repo, create a Markdown file named WhatIsComputerScience.md and write a few paragraphs summarizing Steve Wartik's post and reflecting on why you were asked to read it. Look up John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan and say a bit about who they are and what they did.

This assignment is due Wednesday, February 4th at 11:59 pm.