Week 1: Getting set up

The orientation drop-in — no marks and no submission, but three things week 2's lab expects you to arrive with already working

22 February 2027

This is not one of the eleven assessed labs. It carries no marks, there is nothing to submit, and nobody checks whether you came. What it is not is a week with nothing to do: the three readiness lines at the foot of this page are preparation, and week 2 assumes you have done it.

It is a drop-in, in week 1’s session slot, in the Faculty’s pit wall — the same forty-seat room every lab runs in. Come for five minutes or stay the two hours. Bring the machine you intend to work on for the rest of the semester, because the point of the room is that it is set up while someone who can fix it is standing there.

What the readiness lines are for#

The session is optional. The spec at the foot of this page is not, and that is the point of having one on a page nobody has to attend. Week 2’s lab is two hours long, it is submitted inside the session, and it opens by assuming the supplied codebase is already installed with its own test suite passing. A student who spends the first forty minutes of week 2 on an install has lost the fit, not the install.

So the lines are week-2 readiness rather than in-session tasks. Meet them in this room or meet them at home; nothing records which.

What help is in the room#

Teaching staff, for the whole two hours, and the rest of the class. What we can actually do:

• get Python and a project environment running on Windows, macOS or Linux, including the ones where the university’s own managed install is the problem;
• work out why the supplied test suite fails on your machine when it passes on ours;
• show you the pit wall — where you sit, what is on the screens, and how a session runs, so week 2 is not also your first time in the room.

What we will not do is start week 2’s material. Fitting anything to lap times is week 2’s, and the lab is designed for people who have not seen it yet.

What is supplied#

Both are described here rather than linked: this is a prototype of the course site, and the materials themselves are not part of it.

Before week 2#

The three readiness lines, and nothing else. There is no reading and nothing to hand in — but the lines themselves are the pre-work, and an unprepared machine costs you the first forty minutes of an assessed lab. Week 2’s lab page carries its own preparation, and it is worth opening once before you arrive.