In this first session, we first discussed how the goals of CMPTGCS 1A, namely:

• To prepare students for CMPSC 130A, other upper division coursework, and research in Computer Science, by…
• Providing an accelerated path through the course material of CMPSC 16, CMPSC 24 and CMPSC 32 (which go by CS16, CS24 and CS32 for short.)

We also discussed, more generally:

• the structure of the CCS Computing curriculum
• the roles of CMPTGCS 1A, 1B, 1L and 2
• how those courses map on to the CMPSC 8,16,24,32,40,48,56,64 sequence of courses that they replace (at triple speed.)

We discussed the goal of building a learning community, and made reference to this New York Times article about what Google found about successful teams.

We also began a discussion of git, github.com and github.ucsb.edu. Some of that material can be found in these articles:

https://ucsb-cs16.github.io/topics/git/

The assignment was for each student to look through the two textbooks for the course, which collectively are the textbooks for the CS16,24,32 sequence, and find their individual “starting point”.