CS 396: Meeting 5 – Graduate School
Dear students, Today, Hannah Miller of the University of Minnesota will share with us about a different sort of future: graduate school, which may lead to academia, a research scientist position, or who knows what. Hannah and I collaborated on a research project several years ago. Our mission was to build a social network for […]
CS 1: Lecture 14 – Logical Operators
Dear students, Our computer can now ponder our data. It can examine order and equality, two operations at the root of all decision making. Before we sign up for something, we ask ourselves if the benefit exceeds the cost. We compare two brands of pasta on price and weight. We scan the details of our […]
CS 1: Lecture 13 – Casting and Relational Operators
Dear students, Today we close out our focused discussion on methods. They will never go away; we will continue to write them all throughout the semester. But I want to tie up a few loose ends having to do with types. We will begin with a little science experiment to illustrate the need (or lack […]
CS 396: Meeting 4 – Interviewing
Dear students, With the Career Breakfast and Fair behind us, we enter this nebulous period of waiting for a callback. If we get one, we’ll be in the position of talking at length about ourselves and the company we are courting. This kind of conversation is unfamiliar and universally awkward. We call it the interview. […]
CS 1: Lecture 12 – Testing and Graphics
Dear students, Is there anything like charAt for integers? For instance, given a number and an “index” representing the place, can we get back the digit at that place? Not exactly, but there’s nothing stopping us from writing our own method to accomplish this task! But before we do that, let me share with you […]
CS 1: Lecture 11 – Method Mechanics
Dear students, Sometimes Java is criticized for being verbose. But one of the great advantages of verbosity in a language is that a text reinforces itself. We may read a passage and not know every word, but there are often many clues lying in the context to help us determine their meaning. Java has these […]
CS 1: Lecture 10 – Blackboxes
Dear students, Let’s start with a little game called Blackbox! Write on paper a method that takes 1+ parameters. For the body of the method, compute a simple value based on the parameters. Have it return the value. For example, I might write this mysterious method: public static int mystery(int x) { int value = […]
CS 396: Meeting 3 – Resume Reviews
Dear students, Today Alyssa and her colleagues from Career Services will help us review resumes. Here’s your TODO list for next time: If you registered, attend the career breakfast on Thursday morning. Check in with me after you’ve met some employers, and I’ll credit your participation. I strongly encourage you to attend the larger career […]
CS 1: Lecture 9 – Return Values and Parameters
Dear students, Last time we saw how methods capture a process into a reusable component. Methods have some really nice advantages: They drop us into a smaller world with a smaller problem to solve. Instead of thinking about the grand mission of our program, we think about the baby step of the method. They can […]
CS 1: Lecture 8 – Methods
Dear students, First, let’s a new data type to our repertoire: a random number generator. If I tell you that the name of this type is Random, could you create a new variable that is capable of generating random numbers? You should be able to. We can tell by its capitalization that it is a […]