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Presenting… every skit filmed during Brown’s CS intro course CS15 in fall 2009.

They’ve been a while coming but I’m thrilled to finally have them online for anyone to see. The atmosphere and attitude captured in these videos is probably unique to, and more importantly absolutely ubiquitous within, CS15.

Opening Day Skit

The skit showed/acted on the first day of class. Star Trek themed (as was the course and website) in 2009. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Collaboration Policy Skit

3 short filmed skits animating the course’s collaboration policy. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Star-crossed References

An in class skit personifying some of the aspects of programming and the Java environment. Includes variable scope, garbage collection, references and constants. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Slush Gray

In class, Snow White themed skit. Has a linked list. The skit is a long-standing CS15 feature. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Othello

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Othello’ in which students make the board game Othello and implement a minimax based AI.

Adventure

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Adventure’ in which students make a 3d randomly generating objective based maze game.

Sketchy

The skit preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Sketchy’ in which students make a basic graphics editing program. Written by previous years’ TAs.

Credits

The credits reel for all of the videos included on the DVD from which they were ripped.

Bloopers

Bloopers reel from lots of the above videos. » Read the rest of this entry «

I TA’d the introductory Java/Object Orientated Programming CS15 this past semester. It’s a pretty interesting course as an introduction, racing people who’ve never programmed in their lives straight through inheritance and polymorphism in the first half of the semester – pretty much before using a single operator. It can get pretty intense.

My job, aside from the universal holding office hours and grading papers was to create and maintain the website, as well as to do a couple of odd jobs such as the pictured poster (which really should have had more actual information on it). That said, holding office hours and actually teaching was by far the most fun part.

Anyway, I guess this post is most directed to people considering to apply to TA the course, so I’ll try to include some useful info. For one, it’s a lot of work, a lot of time (a fair number of people end up taking only three courses while TAing this class) and you’ll be terribly underpaid. Do it because you enjoy teaching or because you want too be more involved with the Brown CS department – whatever other reason you want. It’s also a really good way to become really familiar with the course material. Aside from academic stuff, you’ll be working really closely with 15 people or so and you’ll probably get to know at least some of them really well. You’ll have ample opportunity to get to know some of the students as well.

In short, apply! It’s worth it.

This semester I’m a teaching assistant for the CS015 course at Brown that I wrote about half a year ago. My main responsibility this summer has been revamping the course website. If you are reading this blog post any time before the summer of 2010, you can probably see the new layout live. In the case that I’m communicating with you over a year into the future you can see a screenshot.

My brief was to make a website that would fit with the course’s theme (Yes the course has a theme. Read the aforementioned blog post), Star Trek. I decided to base the website off the Star Trek universe’s LCARS computer systems. This was by no means an original take on making a Star Trek tribute layout – lots of fan sites have done similar things – but it is certainly recognizable.

I cherry picked other layout aspects quite liberally from different time points in the Star Trek series. The header text uses the typeface from The Original Series. LCARS itself only features in episodes and movies placed chronologically after TNG. The ship shown is the Enterprise of the 2009 Star Trek relaunch.

I ran into the CSS column issue when making the layout. The dashed line under the navigation buttons was always intended to stretch to the bottom of the layout no matter how long the content was. I originally made this work with positioniseverything’s CSS columns hack but later realized that there would be anchored links in the content presented in the layout. The anchored links caused the layout to break in Firefox, so I was forced to revert to javascripting the same effect. However the javascript I (found via google and) used to do it doesn’t work in some versions of IE. I obviously need to become proficient with a JQuery or another good javascript library.

The layout also uses conditional comments and the ie7-js script to mitigate issues with IE6, in particular the use of a png image with an alpha layer for the Enterprise in the top left.

In closing… if you are reading this and are an undergraduate at Brown, take the course this year! If you tell me you’ve read this post, I’ll give you extra special help*.
*This statement is probably a lie.

The main introductory Computer Science course at Brown is CS015, an introduction to object orientated programming. It is a Java course aimed both at those with limited and those with no java and programming experience. CS017 is the equivalent course for those who have done a fair amount of programming before.

The lecturer for the course is Andy Van Dam who holds a highly esteemed position within both the Brown and the US Computer Science communities. More information about Andy is scattered across the net, but suffice to say he is a good lecturer.

» Read the rest of this entry «