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Welcome to EECS 183! This is the start of a series of short tutorials to help you get your computer 100% set up for this course. We do not expect you to have prior experience with most (if any) of these topics, so don’t worry if it’s all new. You are right where you belong and this course is made for you. Very soon, this will all be very familiar to you, and you’ll have a set of super useful tools.

Do your best to complete the tutorials according to the schedule in the course calendar. We will assume you’ve done so when working with the course material (in class, labs, etc.). BUT if you have a problem, it’s ok! All of us on the course staff are very happy to help you, so please see us in office hours. Posting questions on Ed is also a great option.

Problems Completing the Tutorials?

If you’re experiencing a problem that is causing a temporary delay in completing the tutorials, you can still participate in the course and get things done. It will just be less convenient until everything is worked out. If you find yourself in this situation, you’ll need to use an online Python interpreter for a couple days. There are several if you do a search for them; we recommend the W3 Schools Python Compiler. You can type your code in the left panel, and click the run button to watch the results in the right panel. If you’re reading this at a time when we haven’t talked about Python much at all yet, don’t worry. It will all make sense soon.

Warning: The W3 Schools Python Compiler website will not save your code when you leave the site! When you’re done with a coding session, make sure you highlight all of your code, and copy it into a local file that you save on your computer. If you just close the website, you will lose your code!

Danger: The W3 Schools Python Compiler is just a temporary solution to use for a couple days if you’re having trouble setting up your computer and haven’t gotten to office hours yet. A delay in getting your computer set up will lead to problems participating in the course.

Video Walkthroughs

Jungeun Seo made some video walkthroughs for tutorials 1 - 3. You can find them in Tutorial Videos folder on the Google Drive. You’re not required to watch them, but you may find them helpful in combination with the written instructions.

Tutorial Links and Due Dates

(1) Files and Folders - Monday, January 12, 11:59 PM Eastern
(2) Setting Up Python - Monday, January 12, 11:59 PM Eastern
(3) Setting Up VS Code - Monday, January 12, 11:59 PM Eastern
(4) Using PrairieLearn - Monday, January 12, 11:59 PM Eastern
(5) Debugging - Tuesday, January 20, 11:59 PM Eastern
(6) Testing - Monday, January 26, 11:59 PM Eastern

Copyright and Academic Integrity

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

All materials provided for this course, including but not limited to labs, projects, notes, and starter code, are the copyrighted intellectual property of the author(s) listed in the copyright notice above. While these materials are licensed for public non-commercial use, this license does not grant you permission to post or republish your solutions to these assignments.

It is strictly prohibited to post, share, or otherwise distribute solution code (in part or in full) in any manner or on any platform, public or private, where it may be accessed by anyone other than the course staff. This includes, but is not limited to:

Public-facing websites (like a personal blog or public GitHub repo).
Solution-sharing websites (like Chegg or Course Hero).
Private collections, archives, or repositories (such as student group “test banks,” club wikis, or shared Google Drives).
Group messaging platforms (like Discord or Slack).

To do so is a violation of the university’s academic integrity policy and will be treated as such.

Asking questions by posting small code snippets to our private course discussion forum is not a violation of this policy.