Welcome. Labs will truly start next week with Lab 1. In this week's abbreviated lab, we wanted to give you some general information about the purpose of labs in this course, as well as to give you a chance to work out some technical details on our machines.

The lab assignments for this course are designed with the intent that they can be completed -- start-to-finish -- during the 50 minute lab period. Furthermore, many labs are designed to be preliminary versions of tasks which will show up in programming assignments due the following week. For these reasons, You must attend the lab and turn in your results at that time, in order to receive credit. No credit will be give for ``late'' labs without advanced arrangments between the student and the TA.

Labs will be graded almost on a pass/fail basis. The intent is for you to make reasonable progress in solving the given task. You are not ever required to submit anything electronically for labs, and you are never expected to polish any source code as would be expected for the formal programming assignments. Each lab is worth a maximum of two points. Full credit will be given to anyone making reasonable progress towards the goal. One of two points will be given to those making an effort, but having more serious difficulties. Zero points will be given for those who make no effort (e.g., do not attend).

In this week's abbreviated lab, there are four things we hope you accomplish:

1. Become introduced to our Teaching Assistant, who will be leading the labs throughout the course.

2. If you have not already filled out the online questionnaire, please do so.

3. Please make sure that you have a valid account/password on our department NT network.

4. If you are at all new to Java or to the Java environment here at Loyola, please speak with our TA who can give you some advice on the tools and software which we have installed on our machines to support programming in Java.