University of Wisconsin-Madison

You are welcome to use any computing facilities for the homeworks and projects in this course.

For the projects, you will need to be able to run Scratch. Scratch is free and runs on Mac OS X and Windows (2000, XP, and Vista).

You are welcome to use the Windows or Mac machines in the instructional cluster on the first floor of the Computer Sciences department. The hours and room numbers are available here.

Everyone in the class has a Computer Sciences account. To activate your CS account, you go to one of the Windows machines in our instructional cluster, click on "Activate new account" and type in your UW ID number along with a new password of your choosing. You will then have an account on both the Windows and Mac clusters. On the Windows machines, you can find Scratch in the menu for Applications.

The TAs will be in the Mac instructional lab (CS 1370) during their Office Hours in order to answer any questions you may have. We encourage you to work on your homework and projects in the Mac lab (especially at these times) to get immediate feedback from your peers and TAs. You are welcome to use your own laptop in the Mac lab.

If you use your own personal laptop or computer, we strongly recommend using Dropbox to backup copies of all of your important files. This is a free service that will automatically copy your files over the network to a remote location; if your laptop later has problems (dies, is stolen, or corrupts your data), you can use Dropbox to restore your old files. If you have multiple machines, Dropbox will also automatically synchronize the files across them. Use this link to get a few extra MB of Dropbox storage space: Dropbox Referral

You will use Learn@UW to turn in your assignments and to see your grades.