>> I'm Steven Wong. 
 >> I'm Joe Warren. 
 >> I'm Scott Rixler. 
 >> And I'm John Griner. 
 >> I'd like to welcome everyone to our 
class. 
An introduction to interactive computing 
in Python. 
we've got a lot of fun activities planned 
for the next eight weeks. 
And to get things rolling, we've all worn 
our T-shirts for rock, paper, scissor, 
lizard, Spock. 
This is going to be your project at the 
end of the fist week. 
So guys let's just play a game of kind of 
a battle royal here and just we'll show 
them how it works. 
Okay, ready? 
 >> Okay. 
 >> Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, spock, 
shoot. 
[LAUGH] What you think? 
 >> Oh it's everybody. 
 >> I'm, I'm scissors. 
 >> You're scissors. 
 >> Oh scissors[CROSSTALK] 
 >> Listen. 
 >> No. 
[LAUGH] 
 >> I tried. 
 >> Anyways we're having fun doing this class 
and I think you're going to have a lot of 
fun doing the class. 
I'll be back in a couple of seconds and 
we'll talk a little bit more about the 
details and what's going to go on in the 
class and maybe show a couple of exciting 
things you're going to do. 
I'll see you in a second. 
Well, welcome to another session the 
introduction to interactive programming 
in Python. 
We're really excited to have everyone 
here. 
I think this class is going to be a 
blast. 
the class is based on a class that I 
taught here at Rice for over a decade. 
in fall 2012, Scott, John, Steven and I 
went through and redesigned this 
classroom from the ground up and built a 
version where we can deliver it online. 
the, our objective in building that 
online version of the class was to make 
it both fun and simple. 
So the fun in this class is going to come 
from the fact you're building games like 
Pong, and Blackjack, and Asteroids. 
We think the class is going to be kind of 
simpler to do because we built some 
custom tools to help you build your 
python code for this class. 
Scott'll talk about this in the next 
video. 
It's called CodeSkulptor, and it's 
going to allow you to build, save, 
submit, and peer evaluate your code for 
your class in a very easy straightforward 
manner. 
My objective in this video, three things. 
First, one how to look at the structure 
of the class, the structure of the class 
webpage. 
I want to give you a peek at what you're 
going to build in the last couple of 
weeks of this class. 
And then finally I want to talk a little 
bit about our philosophy for this class, 
maybe fire you up a little bit. 
Okay, let's get to work. 
Okay, let's walk through kind of the 
structure of the class web page because I 
think this will give you kind of feel for 
the flow of how the class works. 
So here we are at the homepage for the 
class. 
the most important thing to note here is 
we have some announcements. 
You should of received an email for the 
start of class, but most of our 
communication with you will be through 
these class announcements. 
Read them, this is the way we're going to 
talk about important things that are 
going on in the class. 
here we have a welcome to class. 
If you scroll down we actually have a 
discussion of how the class works, and if 
you're curious for example when 
everything is due, read this bold bullet 
right here. 
over here we have upcoming deadlines. 
This is shot before class started so but 
this will start to be populated with 
things that you need to turn in. 
Some of the things will be optional, they 
won't count on your final grade. 
you don't have to do them. 
Things that aren't marked optional you 
need to do them. 
They're going to count as part of your 
final grade. 
Over here is probably where most 
information is. 
This is the nav bar. 
each of these has links to various things 
that actually take place in class. 
we're going to actually offer surveys at 
various points in the class, including a 
welcome survey. 
These surveys are part of a research 
study that we're using to try to 
understand how this class shapes 
attitudes towards computer science for 
the participants. 
It's optional, and you don't have to 
participate. 
It doesn't effect your grade. 
But if you participate, it will help us 
make this class better. 
here we have links to all the video 
lectures. 
the thing to note here is we've actually 
expanded the class from 8 to 9 weeks. 
The original version had video for weeks 
1 to 8. 
based on class feedback we've added a 
week 0 to kind of introduce to this 
material kind of introductory material, a 
little more slowly give true novices a 
little more time to kind of acclimatize 
to what we're doing. 
So you'll see there's now week zero in 
there. 
And if you notice any kind of sequencing 
errors or issues of continuity in there 
just be aware that we've added this week 
zero after the fall 2012 session so be 
patient with us. 
It's hard to shoot lots of new video. 
We decided to focus on providing you with 
some new tools that will show instead 
when we offered this session. 
quizzes. 
Quizzes are part of things you're going 
to use to kind of assess how you're doing 
in the class. 
They're machine graded. 
For most weeks, there'll be two quizzes 
per week. 
There'll be a soft deadline on kind of 
Tuesday night, Thursday night. 
the hard laid line will always be at 
05:00 GMT on, on Sunday morning. 
So it's going to kind of, for most of you 
be due sometimes late Saturday night or 
early Sunday morning. 
There's no penalty for turning it in up 
to the hard deadline. 
After the hard deadline, there's no late 
submission. 
The mini projects, I'll actually walk you 
through this in fairly great detail in 
the mini project for week zero, we want a 
shrubbery. 
so watch that video. 
That's optional so you don't have to do 
it, but if you're curious how to actually 
go through the process of creating, 
submitting, and evaluating it, take a 
chance and do that optional mini project. 
the discussion forums, it's the place 
where really lots of learning takes place 
in this class. 
when you get stuck, the discussion forum 
is the place that you'll go to actually 
interact with your peers and the 
community TA's and the instructors to 
figure out what's going on. 
here's a link to CodeSkulptor this is the 
tool that we're going to use for the 
class. 
You'll be using it a lot. 
we have other kind of auxiliary links 
here. 
concept examples is essentially an 
outline of the class material. 
And it also contains lots of examples. 
So let me just walk out here real quick. 
So for example go to week zero. 
Its kind of has a description of all the 
various concepts we're going to cover in 
week zero. 
Most importantly they're links here to 
co-scope their files. 
They give examples of all these. 
So if you're stuck and you need another 
example to understand the concept, you 
can come out here and look at this. 
new for this session, we've added in some 
practice exercises. 
And then these are designed to help 
students that have never programmed 
before, to kind of get more practice in 
building really simple Python programs. 
These are designed for self study, we 
give you a template with kind of, a 
statement of what you needed to do. 
And then you write a second, a second 
version that 's the solution. 
So what you should do is read the 
problem, take the template, do it, and 
when you're done, look at our solution 
and compare the two. 
We have about a dozen for each of these, 
each of these half weeks here. 
the last thing is I have, there's a tool 
called Pystep that we've built. 
It's designed to kind of help you 
understand evaluation for Python 
programs. 
they'll be a video on it in week one. 
So when you get there, watch the video go 
out and play around with it. 
It's kind of another way to help 
understand how basic Python works. 
that's why the main overview for what 
you're going to see here again the 
critical thing to do is to go back to the 
main page here and read these messages. 
Because this is really going to keep you 
up to date on what's happening in class. 
Okay, lets go on to take a peek at what 
you're going to build in the class. 
Well I promised you a peek at your final 
project and here it is. 
This is RiceRocks. 
It's basically a clone of a 80's arcade 
game Asteroids. 
Let me just show you how it works here. 
We'll click to get started, and we use 
the arrow keys, and we can fly our 
spaceship around, and we destroy 
asteroids. 
If an asteroid is destroyed, we get ten 
points. 
If I happen to crash into an asteroid, I 
lose a life. 
And the goal is to score as many points 
as possible in your three lives. 
Now, looking at this, it may seem kind of 
hard to imagine you could go from knowing 
nothing about programming, to building a 
game like this in nine weeks. 
The reality is we've designed the class 
to teach you in each week a little bit 
more of Python so that it doesn't, that 
in those last 2 weeks you can build this 
project. 
Now we're going to give you a fair bit of 
support in building that project, we're 
going to provide you with custom art, 
we're going to provide you with 
professional produced sound. 
we're going to provide you with lots of 
videos and quizzes and things to help you 
understand how to do it. 
but it's not impossible. 
4100 people in fall 2012 managed to 
finish this project. 
my hope is for this session we can get 
10,000 students to build this project, 
and I hope you're one of them. 
So with that said, let me go on to kind 
of our last segment, I went to talk a 
little bit about the philosophy of the 
class, because I'll echo what i just said 
there. 
Alright let me finish up with kind of a 
little bit about the philosophy that we 
have for this class. 
We're going to do our best to put on a 
great class. 
we're experimenting with new techniques 
and new methods to help you learn the 
material better. 
we may try, for example, some studies 
involving how to improve peer assessment. 
We've created Phystep. 
when the things that we do sometimes that 
they go wrong, we need your patience. 
We'll work really hard to fix them. 
if something specific to you goes wrong 
just remember there's going to be many 
tens of thousands of students in this 
class and it's going to be very hard for 
us to address individual concerns. 
But again we will try our best. 
We need something from you. 
There's going to be times when you're 
working on the mini-project where you're 
going to get stuck. 
You're going to be like I don't 
understand what's going on. 
I don't know why my code's not working. 
I'm going to talk about in 
rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock some 
very tangible things that you can go 
through to try to keep making progress on 
the mini-project. 
But I could only tell you the most 
important attribute you need right now is 
tenacity. 
If you get frustrated and you get stuck 
don't quit. 
Take a break for a little while. 
Come back and work on the mini project 
some more. 
I think you'll find that as you kind of 
work your way into the class the 
excitement of actually building your mini 
projects and getting them working will 
kind of carry you through the frustration 
that you feel if you're getting stuck at 
some point in the process. 
I'm going to say one more thing about the 
video. 
there's times in this class when we're 
going to do goofy stuff. 
Our goal is to be a video, is to be 
funny. 
Sometimes we're lame, I admit it. 
But we're trying to avoid being boring. 
And so I'll end this with actually 
pointing you back to kind of another 
version of our introduction. 
That, I got ganged up on and suppressed. 
So take a look at it. 
you guys ready to play? 
Ready? 
 >> Yep. 
 >> Okay. 
 >> Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock, 
shoot. 
[LAUGH] 
 >> Alright, let's do it again, do it again 
guys. 
 >> Alright. 
 >> Ready? 
Ready, rock, paper, lizard, scissors, 
spock, shoot. 
 >> What did you do Scott? 
 >> Paper 
 >> Paper just did Spock yeah 
 >> [LAUGH] Anyways we're having a lot of fun 
in this class and I think you're going to 
have a lot of fun too.