Zoom

Our video communication platform is Zoom. Zoom allows sharing of your screen with the other participants. This is used by the tutors when lecturing.

The zoom link for the course will be distributed to you by email.

When you start Zoom, it will ask you at some point for your name - this will be displayed during the video session. Best use a name that others can use to address and identify you during the course: for example your full name, or your preferred nickname and family name. (Try to keep the displayed name consistent throughout the course in Zoom and in Zulip, so that we can get to know each other and are able to associate names and people over time. It would also good if the name clearly relates to the name under which you registered for the course.)

You can also share your screen during practical sessions where you will work on practical problems, or when you have a question for one of the tutors. While you share your screen in Zoom, you can give another participant in the zoom session control of your mouse and keyboard. This means that the other person can control your computer (you will see how they move the mouse, control the cursor, and what they might type on the keyboard). This can be used, for example, to work on a computer programme together: You can look at the same programme (through zoom), and any person in the group can get control of the keyboard. [This feature is not fully stable across all Zoom clients; best to upgrade to the latest version if you run into problems.]

Zulip

Zulip is a communication tool for teams that allows sending and receiving of text-based messages. Here is an introduction to the topic.

You have already (or hopefully will soon) receive an email invite to join the Zulip “MPSD Training” instance at https://chat.mpsd.mpg.de . You can then sign in with your email address as the login and a password of your choice which you need to set up the first time you sign in.

In Zulip, you should be subscribed to the py4cs-2024 stream. Within this stream, you can post messages.

Each message needs a topic, and you will see the list of topics growing over time. You can reply to an existing topic, or start a new one.

The use of topics allows to discuss multiple topics in parallel, without the messages interfering: You can search for topics, or display all messages for one topic, or mute a topic if you are not interested in that discussion.

It is possible to change the topic of messages retrospectively - so please do not hesitate to post messages with new topic names. Over time, we will find out together what topic names are useful names.

Here is the summary of the Zulip help on the topic of topics if you are interested.

Including Python code in your Zulip message

It is often a good idea to add the Python code the question is about to your Zulip question. In that case, we need to tell Zulip to not format the Python source.

Let’s assume you want to include the following Python function in your message:

def f(x):
    return x**2

In that case, you can write:

```python3
 def f(x):
     return x**2
```

and the Python program will be displayed with syntax highlighting in Zulip. (The python3 after the triple back tick tells Zulip which syntax highlighting rules to follow.)

Enriching messages with emojis

Each message can be annotated with an emoji to express agreement, confusion, joy, etc as a re-action to the message.

To do this, you need to highlight the existing message (this should show a thin blue frame around the message which can be moved up and down to other messages using the cursor keys), and then press : to add a “reaction” to the message.

You should see this search field, in which you can enter a search term to find the appropriate emoji.

For the often-used thumbs-up icon (also called “+1”), there is a special short-cut defined in Zulip: just type + on the message you want to add the thumbs-up reaction.

Here is a message with the :+1 and :rofl reactions added:

We assume — for the explanation above — that you either use the web interface at https://chat.mpsd.mpg.de or one of the GUI-clients that are available for Windows, Linux and OSX. On the Android and iOS clients, the user interface is a little different.

Interactivity

Please engage with the remote teaching efforts.

It is essential to have an interaction between learners and teachers so that the teachers know how well the material is understood, if they move to slowly or to fast, or if the attention span of people has expired and a break is needed.

Do ask the questions during the lectures (try the “raise hand feature in zoom”), or engage if the lecturer ask the audience a question.

Also use the Zulip chat to discuss the topics and ask questions (see above) - also during the lecture.

Zoom etiquette

• During lectures, please mute your microphone (unless you are about to speak)

• During lectures, we ask you to switch your camera on: this will help the lecturer to gauge the understanding of the audience.

  (If we run into bandwidth problems, we may need to revise this, but Zoom should be clever enough to reduce video resolution and slow down the frame rate if required so that the audio channel is not affected by a poor Internet connection.)

• If you do need to leave a session for a moment (pets and children to deal with, etc), just switch the camera off for a moment (or leave it running if you don’t mind), and switch it back on when you are back.

Zoom chat or Zulip chat?

During the lectures, it seems most straightforward to use the Zoom chat to ask questions. This is not wrong, but note that the question and the answer will disappear when that zoom session is closed (so typically at the end of a lecture, or if the session crashes or the ‘end meeting’ button is pressed by accident).

In constrast, messages posted on Zulip will persist (and also the answers) and can thus be re-read when you have more time or a better understanding etc. You can also use more sophisticated formatting (such as LaTeX for equations and syntax highlighting for Python code) on Zulip.

In short: asking questions on Zulip is (slightly) preferred.