Welcome, Introduction, and Setup

Today:

• intros

• what the learning goals of the course are

• see how in class time will work

• start learning git/github by doing (we’ll cover the theory after the practical)

Not Today:

• syllabus review (on your own time/lab Monday)

• course policy discussion (next week)

Introductions¶

• Dr. Sarah Brown

• Please address me as Dr. Brown or Professor Brown,

• Ms./Mrs. are not acceptable

You can see more about me in the about section of the syllabus.

Prismia¶

• instead of slides

• you can message us

• we can see all of your responses

• emoji!

questions can be “graded”

• this is instant feedback

• participation will be checked

• correctness will not impact your final grade^[1]

• this helps both me and you know how you are doing

This course is structured a bit different than many classes¶

• no Brightspace

• 300 level = more independence

• I will give advice, but only hold you accountable to a minimal set

• High expectations, with a lot of flexibility

as an aside another Professor describing what she does not like about learning management systems (LMS). Brightspace is one, she talks about Canvas in the post, but they are similar.

My focus is for you to learn¶

• that means: practice, feedback, and reflection

• you should be able to apply this material in other courses

• you should know that you have learned and be able to talk about it in an interview

Learning comes in many forms¶

• different types of material are best remembered in different ways

• some things are hard to explain with words, but watching it is very concrete

Learning is the goal¶

• producing outputs as fast as possible is not learning

• in a job, you may get paid to do things fast

• your work also needs to be correct, without someone telling you it is

• in a job you are trusted to know your work is correct, your boss does not check your work or grade you

• to get a job, you have to interview, which means explaining, in words, to another person how to do something

How does this work?¶

In class:¶

1. Memory/ understanding check

2. Review/ clarification as needed

3. New topic demo with follow along, tiny practice

4. Review, submit questions

and repeat

Outside of class:¶

1. Read notes to refresh your memory, check your understanding, and find more details

2. Complete badges to apply material that has been taught

3. Prepare for class to activate your memory of related things to what we will cover

4. Read articles/ watch videos to either fill in gaps or learn more details

5. Bring questions to class

Getting started¶

Your KWL chart is where you will start by tracking what you know now/before we start and what you want to learn about each topic. Then you will update it throughout the semester. You will also add material to the repository to produce evidence of your learning.

GitHub Docs are really helpful and have screenshots¶

• editing a file

• pull request

they pay people to update them so I direct you to theirs mostly instead of recreating them

Today we did the following:

1. Accept the assignment to create your repo: KWL Chart

2. Check your email and accept the invitation

3. Edit the README to add your name by clicking the pencil icon (editing a file step 2)

4. adding a descriptive commit message (editing a file step 5)

5. adding prior knowledge

6. created a new branch (named kwl-git) (editing a file step 7-8)

7. added a message to the Pull Request (pull request step 5)

8. Creating a pull request (pull request step 6)

9. Clicking Merge Pull Request

Git and GitHub terminology¶

We also discussed some of the terminology for git. We will also come back to these ideas in greater detail later.

Practice with the vocab, while you read through the syllabus, hover over highlighted words like the ones below:

• git

• GitHub

• repository

• branch

• pull request

• commit

Terms like this will appear throughout the notes over the course of the semester. They are there to help you study and reinforce what you are learning.

GitHub Actions¶

GitHub allows us to run scripts within our repos, the feature is called GitHub Actions and the individual items are called workflows.

Navigate to your actions tab

Get Credit for Today’s class¶

Run your Experience Reflection (inclass) action on your kwl repo

talk with peers to make sure you remember what the right way to click on it is

On the created PR, go to the Files section, edit the file, and commit the changes to the experience-2026-01-22 branch.

Prepare for Next Class¶

1. (for lab Monday) Read the syllabus section of the course website carefully and explore the whole course website

2. (for lab Monday) Bring questions about the course

3. (for class Tuesday) Think about one thing that you know really well (computing or not). Be prepared to discuss the following: How do you know that you know it? What was it llike to first learn it? (nothing written to submit, but you can use your issue to take notes if you would like)

4. Check for comments on your Experience Badge PR and reply to them.

Badges¶

Experience Report Evidence¶

You need to have a KWL repo and be a member of the course organization.

Questions After Today’s Class¶

How will the other badges be used later on? For example, are there badges for homework and projects?¶

There will be other types of badges, they are detailed on the grading page. I’ll answer questions about how it works next week.

How is Github used in the real world?¶

For managing code (e.g. versions, releases, builds, etc) and projects (it has lots of proejct management tools, we will focus on issues, but you can get credit for trying others).

One question I have is how to use the checks tab in github?¶

If you add automated tests to the repo as github actions, they will show up.

Here is a PR I have open in another project with checks. The checks are defined in action files in the .github folder. In your KWL your .github folder only has actions, not checks, but, writing checks for common activities is a possible explore or build badge project.

Is where in github and how are we submiting assigmemnnts¶

Yes!

What might I want to brush up on in preparation for this course?¶

When class sessions will build on specific prior knowledge, your prepare work before class will tell you what to think about. For the very start, if you took any programming classes last semester you should be fine, if not, maybe do a tiny side project (anything with debugging and managing code is good).

What types of projects and work will we complete this semester ?¶

You’ll have some choices. If you like completeing bigger projects you can do that, if you do not, you can choose to do smaller assignments.

You can look at a past semester^[2] to see examples. I reuse some, but change some things too.

How much is GitHub used for data science projects?¶

GitHub is how lots of people share their data science, plus it is also where most common DS libraries are hosted. For example jupyter, pandas, sklearn, tensorflow, are all hosted open source on github.

Will we be learning how to make a professional profile page?¶

We will learn directly all of the components to do that and that is an optional project that you could do as a build badge.

When should I use a branch instead of working on main?¶

Almost always. Especially if collaborating.

Why is git and github used frequently in the computer science world?¶

Keeping track of versions has been done for a very long time. git is so much better than all of the previous version control systems it’s basically all anyone uses anymore. Even really big legacy code bases that have decades of work in another version control system are movign to git.

git is super fast and distributed. plus some other advantages. We will answer this question throughout the semester as we unpack the details of how git works

If you make another brance separate from your main one, if you want to do a pull request/merge it with the main branch does it take only the information from the last commit?¶

No, when you merge two branches all of the commits from the compare branch are added to the base branch.

How does the new content show up after you have merged it to the main branch (ie. is it at the bottom, is it at the top, is it in the middle, etc.)¶

This is a great question and one that you already have the skills to test and figure it out.