Structure. Labs will typically begin with a brief lecture and/or example to reinforce the material covered in lecture. The class will then have chance to ask questions. After that, there will be a series of exercises for you to complete. You are welcome to work on the exercises on your own or pair up with a classmate.
Attendance:
It is important that you attend the lab for which you are registered on StudentLink. If you need to attend another lab section on any given week, please notify your instructor in advance.
For each lab, you must be checked off by either a teaching fellow or course assistant in order to recieve credit for the lab.
Participation:
To get full credit for participation in lab, you must work productively and submit the work that you complete as specified by the TA. You will not be penalized if you cannot finish all of the lab exercies, but we strongly encourage you to complete the exercises outside of lab, and check your answers with the solutions when posted.
Don’t hesitate to ask for help! The course staff is more than happy to help you with any questions that you may have, and we will be coming around to assist you during lab.
Note
You cannot get credit for completing the lab tasks at home and coming to lab only to sign the attendance sheet. Part of participation is attending the lab to interact and ask questions.
Collaboration.
Using folders
We strongly encourage you to create a separate folder for each lab
and each problem set, so that you can more easily keep track of
your work. For example, you could create a folder called lab1
for your work on this lab, and put all of the files for this lab
in that folder.
In Lab 0, you should have installed your IDE on your computer. If you have not, please do so ASAP.
At the end of Lab 0 you were also instructed to completed your first program. If you have not done so, please do it now using these instructions
A few useful tips when working with VSCodium:
A lot of VSCodium problems and glitches can be solved by cleaning the workspace.
Click on the Java Projects tab within the Explorer, and select More Actions (the three dots).
Then select Clean Workspace.
If the VSCodium Terminal is acting up, one option is to kill the terminal and restart it.
In the Terminal tab, there is a trash can icon to the top right side.
Select that to Kill Terminal, then restart it by either running your program again or
selecting New Terminal under the Terminal tab at the top.
Sometimes your files can get long and confusing, and finding methods within your file may get hard. VSCodium provides an Outline tab in the Explorer. If you click on it, it will show you a list of locations within your file, and clicking on them will automatically bring you to that location. This can be helpful later on in the course when files get longer.
You have pretty much full customization of your window in VSCodium. The most useful may be that you can have multiple files open side by side, allowing for easier access to multiple files simultaneously.
Take some time and mess around with the personalization to make your space to your liking, you’ll be using it a lot throughout the semester.
Let’s start with a simple exercise to get used to the VSCodium Development environment.
Download the following file (in your lab1 directory) on your computer.
Open it up using VSCodium. Now pretend you are the Java compiler and try finding all
the intentional bugs in the program. How many errors can you find?
Fix all the errors and try to run your program. If you fixed all the compilation errors your program should run. If you did not find all the errors, look through the compiler errors to see if you can fix the remaining. Run your program once all the errors are fixed.
Now look at the result. Is it correct? If not, there may be a logic error. Can you find it?
Last updated on September 7, 2026.