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Power-packed week in terms of CS!

How do emails work?

They have already used email as users and learned about etiquette too. It was time to learn “how” emails worked. In Q1 they had already learned about the internet, so the email lecture continued from there.

I walked them through what happens when we hit the send button and made them familiar with terms like mail server, mail client, protocols (SMTP etc.).

Teacher’s notes on e-mail can be found here.

We have not gone deep into computer networking yet, which will be planned for the next quarter, but they have now come across DNS record types like MX and AAAA.

I have started maintaining notes after each lecture so that the teaching assistants know what was covered and plan the practice sessions accordingly.

Quiz

Vishwajeet conducted some quizzes (using our Quizzly app). The goal was to help them get faster at basic calculations:

Terminal

After emails, this was the next thing on my list. Generally, when someone starts to learn programming, they are guided to type python ./app.py. This may be their first interaction with the terminal. But interacting with the terminal is far too important a piece to be taught as a by-product.

We decided to get them comfortable with the terminal early on, so when we start foundations of programming, they can already find their way around the OS using shell commands.

After 2 lectures and 1 practice session, they now understand:

• File System structure (tree)
• Paths
• Basic commands like cd, pwd, cp, mv, touch, grep etc.

Teacher’s notes on Terminal & Shell can be found here.

The only piece remaining is the combination of commands, i.e. piping and redirection, which I plan to wrap up early next week.

Movie Time

Yesterday, we watched “Night at the Museum” at the campus. It was fun and I gave them an assignment to note down new words and find their meaning + use in a sentence.

Up Next

While we will be away for IndiaFOSS + Foundation visit during the weekend, they will have their tests for Q1 topics, so that we can be confident to move on. We will start with new topics in (Discrete) Mathematics after our BLR visit.