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.

To use the CS machines, you must first activate your CS account. Everyone in the class has a Computer Sciences account; to activate it, use any web browser to visit https://csl.cs.wisc.edu/account_management/computer-sciences-account-activation. You will need to authenticate to the UW-Madison NetID Login Service. If you are not already authenticated via NetID, you will be redirected to the NetID Login page when you continue to the account activation page.

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.