Pre-Lecture Prep and Pre-Quiz

To prepare for lecture, please read up to the "In Class Work" section below, and then complete this pre-class quiz to receive credit for participation for Lecture 2. You will need to get both questions correct to receive full participation credit, but you will also have two chances to complete the quiz with feedback in between. The quiz will be due 5 minutes before lecture starts. Please also sign up for piazza (you will receive an invitation in your email) and answer the poll (see below).

Announcements

• Homework 1 is due Tuesday at 11:40am
• Office hours and wizard sessions start next week:
  • Delano: Mondays at 3pm-5pm (same zoom link as lecture), or by appointment
  • Cheever: check his schedule
  • Wizard sessions: Sunday 1-3pm EDT, Monday 7-9pm EDT (zoom link on moodle)

Learning Objectives / Outcomes

In this lecture, you will:

• Learn the basics of Piazza, the help system we will be using, and answer your first piazza poll
• Read about the basics of conditionals and how they are used to control the flow of programs
• Use piazza to post questions you had about Lecture 1 and the pre-assignment for Lecture 2
• Work through multiple examples using if-else statements, buttons and neopixels

By the end of this lecture, you should be able to:

• Use an if-else statement in combination with a button to turn different combinations of neopixels on/off based on the button state(s)

Introduction to Piazza

We have created a dedicated Piazza page for ENGR 015 students and will invite all of you after the first class. Piazza is an online platform for getting help with concepts from lecture/lab and homework assignments. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates and the course staff. Please post all your questions that come up outside of scheduled sessions to Piazza; do not email instructors or wizards. Here's a short video about how to use Piazza.

On piazza, you'll find a poll. Please vote in the poll to show us you've successfully signed up for Piazza. 🍨

Introduction to Conditionals

In Lecture 1, we discussed how programming is like giving a robot instructions. We needed to learn both about what instructions to give the robot, and also how to tell the robot in which order to execute those instructions. We learned about CircuitPlayground.setPixelcolor(), and delay(), two functions we can use to tell the Circuit Playground what to do. We were introduced to the setup() and loop() functions, with code inside setup() running once, and code inside loop() running indefinitely thereafter.