Course Services

Overview

Your day-to-day activities in this course will rely upon a few services. These services are all either university licensed or free for educational use.

Find Your Official UNC E-mail Address

Primary e-mail addresses DO NOT end in @ad.unc.edu!

Many UNC students mistake their primary and secondary alias “active directory” (ad) e-mail addresses. Honestly, I’m not sure why ITS made such a mess of this. You will save yourself and your instructors confusion if you use your primary e-mail address, not your @ad.unc.edu address, because your primary address is what Connect Carolina provides us as instructors!

Find your primary e-mail address by looking yourself up in the UNC directory: https://directory.unc.edu/

Use your primary e-mail address to register for the following services.

Course.Care

Course.Care is for participating in Office Hours, Tutoring, and Review Sessions.

If you have not registered for Course.Care in another UNC course:

  1. Register for Course.Care - our course code is embedded in that link so you shouldn’t be asked for it, but if you are it is 83BE4F.
  2. After verifying your e-mail address fill out your profile with a photo where your face is visible. This will help the course staff get to know your name and face better.
  3. Double check your 9-digit student PID number. Enter it with no dashes or spaces.

If you have registered for Course.Care in another UNC course:

  1. Login and select Join a Course.
  2. Use course code 83BE4F
  3. Viewing the course, under Account on the left-hand sidebar select your name to check your profile
  4. Be sure your face is visible in your profile photo and somewhat recent. This will help the course staff get to know your name and face better.
  5. Double check your 9-digit student PID number. Enter it with no dashes or spaces.

Piazza

Piazza is a forum for the class to ask questions and hold discusssions. Your primary e-mail address will be added to Piazza and you should have received an invite. You can find the course here https://piazza.com/class/kboixq41y9a3sa.

Gradescope

Gradescope is for assignment submission and taking assessments.

Login to Gradescope using your primary UNC e-mail address. If it’s your first time logging in, begin by resetting your password: https://www.gradescope.com/reset_password

You should see COMP110 for this term in your list of courses after logging in with your primary email address. If you do not, please send an email to comp110-heads@googlegroups.com with your primary email address and 9-digit PID. You can continue on with the setup instructions while we add you.

GitHub

GitHub is for backing up your course Workspace Repository and for downloading course materials.

You can think of GitHub as a social network where people and organizations share and collaborate on code with one another. Organizations like NASA, NOAA, Peace Corps, Washington Post, New York Times, and so on, host projects publicly (and privately) on GitHub. It’s a valuable service for data scientists, software engineers, research teams, and more.

Your coursework will have its own private “git repository”. The technology we use for backing up versions of our projects and transmitting them to or from the internet, hosted on GitHub, is called git. Visual Studio Code has git built into it. Git is a powerful version control tool we will only scrape the surface of in COMP110, but if you continue on in a field that involves programming and data you’ll encounter it again.

  1. Register for a GitHub account with your primary UNC address: https://github.com/
  2. After registering, edit your profile from this page: https://github.com/settings/profile
    • Be sure your name and email match what you used on Course.Care
    • If you may continue in a field that involves code (computer science, data science, information science, GIS, analytics, or research/graduate school) I would encourage you take the time now to fill out your GitHub profile with a high quality photo of yourself, a brief bio, UNC Chapel Hill as your “company”, and Chapel Hill (or home) as your location. Think of this as a secondary LinkedIn when it comes to future opportunities, because that’s often how employers and graduate schools look at it.

Now that you’re registered for these course services, return back to the Getting Started Exercise and continue with part 2 of installing the software we’ll use.