This is a rare class that is no affected by Thanksgiving! Since we have lectures on Tuesdays, and assignments due at the beginning of the week…

Hopefully, you will be wrapping up the old stuff (Programming Puzzle 4 and 5). This week we’re moving on to a very different kind of topic: visual design. No, we can’t teach you to be a designer in a week. But hopefully, we can at least raise your awareness of design issues and start you along the path to being a better designer. (if you’re already good, you can always be better).

So please take the design assignment seriously: it will help you far beyond your CS classes. If you ever make a resume, a web page, a flyer – or arguably anything – the ability to have some design awareness is helpful. Actually, even if you never make anything, being aware of what you’re looking at will be helpful.

So, please do the reading for the design assignment – it has 2 required postings for the discussion, but you’ll get a lot more out of it if you actually discuss it with the people in your discussion group.

This week in 638…

• Monday (11/16) – You should have wrapped up Programming Puzzle 4.
• Monday (11/16) – You should look at Programming Puzzle 5 – so you can ask questions in class if you need to. The actual assignment is due next week
• No exact date: You should read one of the readings on jQuery. You should probably read this in preparation for Puzzle 5.
• Tuesday (11/17) – We’ll have a lecture on jQuery and asynchronous programming (the slides are here). And hopefully some help with Puzzle 5.

Looking ahead:

• Make sure that you’ve turned in Puzzle 3 and 4 – since grading will happen soon.
• Puzzle 5 is due on (11/23). You should read something about jQuery to help you do it. We may have a reading discussion to encourage people to do the readings.

Ok, so I posted the week in 559 to this blog – and nobody noticed. This is the right thing…

For this week:

• For Monday (11/2), you should do Reading 8 on debugging and exceptions. Make your initial post by Monday. Also, make sure you’ve tried the closures quiz.
• For Tuesday (11/3), we’ll have a lecture on these topics (including looking at my favorite solution to the closures quiz).

Remember: class will meet in 1325 CS from now on. It will take a little getting used to.

More instructions about what’s coming up will come soon. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Last week, we read about and talked about objects. And you did the 2nd programming puzzle.

This week, I will be out of town (no office hours, and no lecture), so during the week you should:

1. Wrap up Programming Puzzle 2: remember, don’t just post your initial answer. To get full credit, you need to comment on other people’s solutions, and maybe refine yours. You will learn by reading other’s code!
2. Do Reading 7 – read JavaScript in 10 Minutes. This will be a review, but it presents things from a different perspective.
3. There is no lecture on Tuesday, October 27th. You can use the time to do Programming Puzzle 3.
4. Do Programming Puzzle 3. This one is short. If you don’t get it, you’ll see others’ solutions.
5. Since this is a light week, you might use it to catch up on readings.

Last week, we had our first programming puzzle, and started to talk about objects. This week we’ll continue that.

For the week of October 19th:

• We will wrap up Programming Puzzle 1. That means improving your solutions (if you didn’t get it at first, hopefully you did with help. If you did get it at first, hopefully, your solution improved with feedback) as well as giving feedback to others.
• We will start Programming Puzzle 2. For Monday (10/19) – you should at least start. Be far enough that you can ask a question in class (on the index cards) – and maybe even post an initial solution to the discussion.
• Reading 6 talks about some places where bad design decisions in the JavaScript language can cause you problems. There’s no discussion. But you’re probably living it as you program, so this may give you some ideas as to how to mitigate the problems.
• We’re going to start counting how much people have done – expect some “grade” feedback soon. Even though the class is pass fail, you still need to turn stuff in to pass. The number of assignments being turned in is smaller than the number of students on the roster. It is better to turn things in late than never. But you need to turn things in before the grader looks.

Remember:

• There is no lecture on Tuesday, October 27th. There is a lecture on October 20th.

Last week, we discussed doing stuff with the web browser – and hopefully you got to try doing it with the programming puzzle.

For this week:

Reading Assignment 5 and Programming Puzzle 1 are due on Monday 10/12. After Monday, go back and comment on other people’s answers to the programming puzzle! (reading other people’s code is part of the assignment)

In lecture, we’ll talk about object oriented programming.

Based on the results of programming puzzle 1, there will be a second programming puzzle assigned later in the week and due on Monday 10/19.

Last week, we tried to do some peer review (and found bugs in Canvas), looked at what we might do with functions, and puzzled over what “this” means.

And I realized that class might not be worked as I had hoped… Please read the new plan.

For next week:

• We’ll still have Reading 4 (about Objects) due on Monday, October 5. It won’t be the topic of lecture discussion (we’ll come back to it later).
• You might want to look ahead at Reading 5 (about the web browser) – we’ll discuss this in class
• There won’t be a big programming assignment due on October 12. But expect a stream of little programming assignments to start.