Complete Your First Software Engineering Assignment

Learning Goals

Understand the steps needed to complete an assignment and submit it in Canvas

Introduction

During this course, you will work on various assignments as you learn to code. All assignments will be interactive pieces of curriculum that require some work. Some assignments may ask you to follow a set of instructions, while others will ask you to figure out your own solution to pass specific tests. This lesson is your first assignment!

All assignments are hosted on GitHub. In order to work on them, however, you will need to complete work on your local machine. The general process is:

Click the blue "Fork" button in Canvas
Create a personal copy (a 'fork') of the assignment in GitHub
Download your personal copy (referred to as 'cloning') to your computer
Complete the required work
Submit your completed work to Canvas

In this assignment, you'll learn the workflow that you will be using to complete your assignments. You can follow along with the steps in the videos below, or continue reading to get a more detailed explanation of the process of working on lessons in Canvas.

WSL: Completing Assignments Code Along

For Windows users, follow along with this video:

MacOS: Completing Assignments Code Along

For Mac users, follow along with this video:

A Quick Note on Organizing Work on Your Machine

Throughout this course, you will be downloading many assignments, so it is important to keep your code organized. If you haven't yet, we recommend that you go through the steps in the previous lesson to set up a directory where you can keep all of your work for this course.

Note: The process we'll go through in this lesson will create sub-folders automatically. Whenever you are starting a new assignment, navigate back to your main prework folder (cd ~/Development/code/prework) before cloning the assignment to ensure these sub-folders don't get created within each other.

Accessing GitHub and Forking

All the lessons in this course have a corresponding repository (repo) in GitHub. On this page in Canvas, you should see three icons in the upper right corner. The first says Fork. The second is a button that looks like a large-headed cat (GitHub's 'Octocat' icon), which will open the lesson's GitHub repo without forking. The third is a flag, which you can use to submit an issue for the lesson (e.g., if you find a typo or other error).

One way to fork an assignment is to click the Octocat button to go to the assignment's GitHub repo and fork directly from that page. (We'll go through that process in a later lesson.) However, when completing your Canvas assignments, you should use the Fork button. Doing so will automate several steps for you and ensure that, when you complete a lab, it is registered as complete in Canvas.

Go ahead and fork this assignment by clicking the Fork button at the top of the page.

This is just a picture, the button is up at the top of the page.

Clicking the Fork button will do one of two things — it will either start the forking process or bring you to a page where you select where to create your fork. If you're prompted to choose, select your personal GitHub account. The forking process will begin and may take a few moments. When complete, you will be redirected to a new copy of the assignment that exists under your GitHub account. The README.md file in your copy of the repository contains these instructions, so you can continue this lesson here or in GitHub.

Forking is a process which creates an exact copy of a collection of code and files. Once you've created a fork on your own GitHub account, you will be able to edit the files in the repository and write your own code solution without interfering with the original copy.

Once your fork is ready, the next step is to download (clone) your new repository to your local machine.

Cloning to Your Local Machine

To download the repository for this lesson, make sure you're in your personal fork on GitHub, then click the Code button. A pop-up will appear which shows several options for cloning: HTTPS, SSH, and GitHub CLI. Before doing anything else, be sure to switch to SSH. With SSH selected, you should see what looks sort of like an email in the box below, starting with git@github.com:. You should see your GitHub name after the :.

Aside: Why SSH? If you followed the setup instructions, you have added your personal SSH key to GitHub. GitHub will store your personal copies of all the work you do in this course. Because you've added your SSH key, GitHub will know who you are when you send work from your local machine to GitHub to be stored. Using HTTPS instead would require you to sign in from your terminal using your log-in credentials each time you try to push your code to GitHub; it also may not work at all for some assignments.

From here, click the copy button.

Now, open your terminal and navigate to where you'd like to download the assignment (e.g. cd ~/Development/code). Type git clone and a space, then paste in the copied SSH link from GitHub. It should look something like this:

$ git clone git@github.com:<your-user-name>/phase-0-completing-assignments.git

Press enter, and you should see a flurry of terminal activity.

Troubleshooting: If you are a Mac user and you see the following message:

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path

You need to install the Xcode Command Line Tools. Run the following command to install them:
$ xcode-select --install
And follow the prompts. Then try running the git clone command again. See this Stack Overflow post for more details. Note that you may need to re-install xcode-select any time you update your Mac OS version.

Once the terminal gives you control to type again, a new folder with the GitHub name of the assignment will have been created. Change directory into this folder to access the assignment files.

$ cd phase-0-completing-assignments

Now type code . to open up a text editor window with access to all of the assignment's files. These instructions are now also available on your local machine in README.md.

Note: the first time you open a directory in Visual Studio Code, you'll see a message asking "Do you trust the authors of the files in this folders?" This is a security feature of Visual Studio Code. It's safe to choose "Yes", and we recommend selecting the "Trust the authors of all the files in the parent folder" option to prevent this warning from coming up every time you open a lesson. Just be sure to download your code from trusted sources!

Completing an Assignment

Most assignments will have tests that check your work and provide immediate feedback in the terminal. We'll walk through some examples in upcoming lessons.

This assignment has a single test: check to see if you've correctly cloned this assignment to your local machine. If you've followed the steps above, you've completed everything you need to do to pass the test; all that is left to do is run it.

Run learn test in the terminal. This command will install all the lesson dependencies and run the test. You should again see a flurry of text as dependencies are installed. Then you'll see the results of your test. By cloning this assignment down, you've already passed the test!

This assignment
    ✓ has been correctly cloned to your local environment


  1 passing (5ms)

Note: If you did not receive a passing test, or if your terminal produced some sort of error, walk through the steps in this lesson again and make sure you've followed each one. If you got a "command not found" error, go back to the Configuring the Flatiron Student Portal lesson and go through the steps provided there to make sure the learn-co gem was installed correctly. If you're still receiving errors, we recommend going back through the local environment setup instructions again to ensure everything is set up properly.

Once the test is passing, you can head back to the assignment on Canvas. Refresh the assignment page and you should see that Canvas now registers the assignment as both Submitted and Complete. A URL to your fork of the assignment has been submitted in Canvas, so you are ready to move on to the next lesson.

Each assignment will be different and will include instructions on what is required to complete it. Some labs will have many tests. You can run learn test as many times as you'd like while working to solve these labs. You will submit your work to Canvas each time you do, but the assignment will be marked Incomplete until all tests are passing.

Your Work in GitHub

Every time you run learn test, all the changes you've made locally will be automatically pushed to your GitHub fork of the repo. If you head back to your repo after running learn test, you should see a message that a new branch, fis-wip, has been created:

Note: you should disregard the Compare & pull request button.

This branch contains the work you've done so far. If you ever want to go back to a previous solution, go to your repository on GitHub and switch to the fis-wip branch.

Types of Assignments

For most assignments, you will go through the process we just walked through. In our curriculum, these assignments are often referred to as labs — coding lessons that include tests. There are a few other types of assignments, though, that require slightly different submission steps:

Code-alongs: These also require code, but will guide you through what needs to be written. There are no tests to pass, but you will still need to go through forking, cloning, and running learn test. You should see a message stating that no tests were found, but if you check the assignment in Canvas, you should see it is marked as Complete.
Portfolio Projects: For these assignments, you'll be building fully functional applications. Some guidelines and requirements will be provided, but it will be up to you to design and create your own app. These will eventually become the projects you showcase to potential employers! You will submit your projects in Canvas by submitting a link to your GitHub repo.
Blog Submissions: Blogs are a required part of our Software Engineering courses. They help to develop your online presence and are a great way to reinforce the concepts you learn. You'll write your blog posts on a different platform, but submit links to them in Canvas.

Submitting Projects and Blogs

For both portfolio projects and blog posts, you'll need to manually submit a link to your work on Canvas. While viewing the assignment, you should see a Submit Assignment button in the upper-right section of the page.

Clicking this button will bring you to the bottom of the page where you can submit a URL link to your work.

Upon submission you should see confetti appear, indicating that your submission has been accepted.

Note: It is possible to submit lab and code-along assignments manually this way. However, the assignment will only be marked as Submitted, not Complete.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You've completed your first assignment using the learn-co gem! You now know how to work on and submit assignments going forward:

Click the Fork button on the Canvas assignment
Once the assignment is forked, clone it down to your local machine
Complete any required work, then run learn test
When all tests pass, the assignment will be submitted to Canvas and marked as Complete
Your work will also be pushed to GitHub and will be available on the fis-wip branch

Equipped with this knowledge, you are now ready to tackle greater challenges!

SaraBegache/phase-0-completing-assignments