The purpose of this assignment is to help you ensure that your lab notebook shows that you know what you can do and what is and isn’t working. The assignment is split into two parts:
Here is a synopsis of what the syllabus says about lab notebooks:
That’s a lot of information! But you won’t focus on everything at once:
Early in the year you were focused on item 2. Most of you gathered high-quality information for your future self.
Right now you are probably focusing on the effects of brief, daily sessions: Have you established a pattern of brief, daily sessions? If not, what are the barriers? If so, how is the pattern working?
In the next month or two you will focus on the principles and practices that are our essential learning objectives.
Toward the middle of the Spring term you will focus on the principles and practices that you will have mastered—at least to a degree—and on the principles and practices around which you will plan your future development.
In this assignment we share information about notebook entries. You’ll get other pairs of eyes to give you feedback, and you’ll get to borrow other’s best ideas. You’ll also, if you wish, have an opportunity to explain how you have designed your notebook entry or what aspects you’d like feedback on.
Here are your detailed instructions:
nr@cs.tufts.edu
by 11:59PM on Wednesday, November 30. Please place each entry on a separate page, and likewise your statement (or just email me three PDFs).I will not write any letter grades for this assignment. If you provide your own notebook entries and you answer the review questions, you will earn a grade of Satisfactory. If you omit either of these elements you will earn a grade of Unsatisfactory.
If you are keeping an electronic notebook, all word processors can create PDF. If you are using plain text, a file can be converted to PDF using the Linux command
enscript -p- entry1.txt | ps2pdf - entry1.pdf
Physical notebooks can be scanned on the office copier or photographed and then scanned. If you must use a cell-phone camera, please photograph your entry in a strong light. You can then convert to PDF using ImageMagick:
convert entry2.jpg entry2.pdf
Finally, you can group multiple PDFs into a single file by using pdftk
:
pdftk statement.pdf entry1.pdf entry2.pdf cat output submission.pdf