Lab 1: Instructor's Notes

Your students will need to be informed about the following issues before they are able to complete this exercise:

1. How is a computing session initiated at your institution? (e.g., must students turn on the machine? log on? give a password? change their password? etc.)
2. What environment-specific details do they need to know about your institution? (e.g., are they using Unix? MacOS? Windows-95? Windows-NT? stand-alone workstations? workstations served by a file server? dumb terminals? X-Window terminals? stand-alone workstations? etc.)
3. Where should students store their work? (e.g., on a file server? on the local hard drive? in a folder on the desktop? on a floppy disk?) If students are to provide their own floppy disks, be sure to alert them to this requirement beforehand.
4. How do students start the programming environment at your institution? How do students invoke a web browser at your institution? (For the convenience of your students, we recommend that you create aliases/shortcuts for each of these applications.)
5. How do students access the lab manual via their browser? (Bookmarks are one option, entering the URL is another.) You may, if you wish, freely photocopy this first lab exercise to hand out as hard copies to students, if doing this first lab through the browser seems like too much for the first week.
6. Must students do anything special to print hard copies at your institution? (e.g., name the printer, pick up hard copies at a different location, etc.)
7. How is a computing session terminated at your institution? (e.g., must they log out, turn the machine off? etc.)
8. Which of the four projects do you wish them to do as homework when they have completed the lab exercise?

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