Demonstration- Doing the "Hello World" Assignment

So, welcome to our first assignment. Our first assignment, of course, like in all decent programming classes, is printing Hello World. Now we’re going to use the autograder for this. And so, here we are, and let me scroll down. We have a demonstration and it’s kind of matic because that’s the demonstration I’m doing right now, it’s not all that matters. So, here’s an assignment, and assignments are a little bit different when you click them because there’s the honor code and you have to type your name and hit this check box to sort of point out that you’re human and that you’re the right human, etc. And then it’s going to launch the tool when you press open tool here in a new window, and here we go. And so, basically, this is a Python simulated environment. It’s only good enough to do the first ten chapters, but it’s great. Now, the idea that I have is that you will actually write the Python on your computer using a real text editor like Atom, and then just paste the code in here to get graded, but we understand that if you’re using an iPad or something else like that that this might be the only way that you’re going to do it, or if you’re in a school or something and they’ve only got Chromebooks, it’s okay, you can do it. But at some point, like by chapter 11, you need to have Python, but that’s okay. So some of the buttons that you’re going to see here, you won’t see, these are the teaching assistant and configuration buttons, but you will see the check code and the reset code button. And so what you often find when you get this is like I give you some code that is sort of partially there, in this particular one it has a mistake. And so I’m going to run it, say check code, and this actually submits the code to Python and it’ll run. And in this case, it’s got an error, name error print cue is not defined on line two. And, of course, the bug here is, it says please correct your code and rerun, the bug here is that’s supposed to be a t not a q, see, that’s just powerful, so this first program is really quite easy. And so, it also shows you in the autograder the desired output. And so we’ll do check code, and this is going to work. And you see this little spinner, that is the autograder sending your grade back to Coursera, so that it gets back in your Coursera gradebook. And if you don’t see that, then you got a problem, or you can go back and check it in Coursera, but that is the moment where it’s decided that you’ve done a good job. Now, one thing about this is that once your grade has been set in Coursera, you can play around here, mess around, and it doesn’t like send back bad grades, it only sends back good grades. These are all pass/fail, so you either have a 100% or 0%, and if you later mess it up, you still keep a 100% for your grade. So it’s not like the last grade that you sent, it’s actually the high grade, which is really it’s pass/fail, so it’s 0% or 100%. But the other thing that you’ll notice is if I make a mistake in the output it’s not going to update the grade, and so I’m going to make it so the desired output is hello world. And so, if I check the code now, it’s going to say, please correct your code and re-run. It points over here in a mismatch, because this is the output of your program, this is the output it wanted to have happen, okay? And so, that’s what happens, right? Now, the other thing that you will notice, and I can’t really demonstrate it on this first one, is there is a bit of static analysis that this autograder does to your code, and it’s like you should have used a for statement in this problem, or you should have used the input statement in this problem, etc, etc, etc. And so, that also can catch you if you sort of, are supposed to compute something but you just print out the answer. And so it’s not just enough to match the output, you have to match the output, and it does a little bit of looking at your Python code to make sure your Python code makes some sense. Another thing that’s cool about this is this view grades button that you don’t see that we the teaching assistants and teaching staff see. If you’re having problems on an assignment, you don’t have to put your code in the forum, you can simply talk to a teaching assistant in the forum and they can come into the assignment and they can actually see your exact code sitting in the autograder, they can even run your code. And so it’s a much better way to exchange code with the teaching assistants than sort of posting code in the forums. In the very last course we do let you post code in the forums, but in the first four we don’t. I know that’s frustrating to people, but working code makes it too easy for people to just like cut and paste it because we’d like, let me just finish this assignment. And if you don’t struggle on the first few assignments and understand them, then you won’t actually understand the fifth or sixth assignment. And so, taking a shortcut by borrowing code from someone else is really just cheating yourself. And if you put bad code in the forum, that’s even worse. You say, my code is broken and it doesn’t work, and then students are like, well, I’ll just take your broken code. And so, we just don’t like putting code in the forum. And so, that’s basically the idea, let me finish this and get it back correct again, so I print out the right output. So it runs it, you can have a syntax error, which I showed you. You can have an output error. But if the syntax is right and the output is right and you’ve passed all the static checks, then it sends the grade back to Coursera and your grade is updated on Coursera, then you just click to done button when you’re all done, then you’re back in Coursera. So, I hope that was helpful to help get you through writing your first assignment for this class.