Welcome!
We're looking forward to a fun, challenging, and collaborative semester together!
The current Profs are Chris Stone(unflipped) and Carter Slocum(flipped)
The previous Profs were Melissa and Wloka
The Website was mad by Prof. Melissa and is being updated by Prof Slocum.
Much of this website is under construction/updating! Due dates on gradescope are correct the website might be a week off due to build issues.
You'll also sometimes hear the voices of Prof. Talvitie and Prof. Medero in videos. They're awesome professors who also teach CS 70 regularly, and have both contributed a lot to these materials in previous semesters.
In Homework 0 you'll have a chance to tell us a bit about yourself!
How Will This Course Go?
Since 2020, CS 70 has been taught as a “flipped class”. You might have taken flipped classes before, and perhaps have some opinions on this format, but every class is different, so the way CS 70 does being a flipped class is almost certainly not the same as classes you've taken before.
Meh. In person lectures are better.
There are certainly good things about lectures, but lectures aren't perfect either.
Sometimes I need to take a moment to think something through and I don't want to tell everyone to pause the whole class.
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Exactly.
But in class I ask questions! Lots of them, actually. I love asking questions!!
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That's true. But the on-line materials are just the first contact you have with the materials. The lab times, grutoring hours, office hours, and Piazza all provide opportunities for you to engage with the materials further and resolve questions you have.
Course Policies
In any course, it's important to know all the rules and expectations, which is why we have a page dedicated to all the various course policies. You can always find this page linked in the sidebar, but we'll also link it here if you've not already read it:
You read the course policies later if you like, but you'll need to know about them before you can do your first proficiency check, because the first proficiency check is about the course policies!
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It's also a good idea to have read them before the first lab, as we'll talk about them in then.
Getting Help
As you read, you might have questions. If so, there are lots of ways to get your questions answered!
- The sidebar has a link to our page about Piazza, which contains a link to our Piazza site. On Piazza, you can ask questions online and we, as well as the grutors, and your fellow classmates, will try to help.
- Flag us down during lab to ask your question—the whole reason we're with you in lab is to help you out!
- Attend office hours, grutoring hours, or make an appointment to meet with a professor. You can find the schedule in a post pinned to the top in Piazza.
Remember, the materials you read are the starting point for learning, not the whole thing. After that comes studying, discussing, asking questions, practicing, etc. We are here you help you find what you individually need to get the most out of this course!
The CS 70 “Animal Friends”
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What's the deal with the talking animals? Are we being taught C++ by talking Cows? Are you treating us like seven year olds?
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Eeek. I don't want to say anything now!! I'm going to go hide under a blanket!!
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Okay, let's explain.
As you've seen, occasionally, there will be parts where we break up the text with these conversational exchanges.
There are a few reasons we do this:
- A long wall of text can be tiresome to read, so adding some different ways of presenting content helps break things up.
- In an in-person lecture, we'd expect students to put up their hands and ask questions, and those questions are hugely valuable. The animal friends (Duck, Hedgehog, Goat, Cat et al.) ask the same kinds of questions students would ask.
- Sometimes we just want to say something encouraging that isn't really part of the technical content you need to study.
Okay, I think maybe I can get used to this, but why are the instructors represented as cows?
It is part of our heritage.
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Uh, thanks Bjarne. Yeah, that's an in-joke you'll get later.
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But let's explain…
CS 70 has a long history of using Cows as a pedagogical example, with code like
Cow bessie;
bessie.addHat();
Other courses use other things, like one-eyed aliens, but CS 70 uses cows. As far as we can tell, our use of cows may go back to a time when Prof. Stone taught the class, more than a decade ago.
Given the running “cow theme” of CS 70, when it came time to choose avatars to represent the course instructors, cows were the obvious choice.
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Are you sure it isn't that you're a bit nutty?
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That could be it too.
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Being open to some silliness and not taking yourself too seriously is a great way to avoid stress in life.
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I'm writing that down!
One thing you'll notice over your time in the class is that the animal friends all have distinct personalities. You may find one that you kinda relate to. But if you don't, that's fine, too.
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Meh, whatever, can we, uh, actually learn some C++ now?
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Yes, let's do that.
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