Schedule
Public version. A generic week-by-week topic and skill outline. Specific calendar dates, conference sign-ups, and assignment prompts live in the Assignments/LMS space for each section.
This course is a conference-based studio. Scheduled Mon/Wed class times are not ordinary required lectures. They are protected time for the five required conferences, plus optional demonstrations, open studio work, troubleshooting, and individual help.
Required attendance is tied to the five conference weeks — Weeks 1, 4, 7, 10, and 13. Every other scheduled meeting is optional support time you may attend for help or work alongside others.
Week-by-week
| Wk | Topic | Studio focus | Conference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Setup, Quarto, portfolio folder | Install VS Code, R, Quarto, TinyTeX; first render; portfolio layout | Setup conference (required) |
| 2 | LaTeX foundations | Sectioning, math environments, first math document | — |
| 3 | Structuring mathematical writing | Setup, claim, example, and justification in Quarto; headings and bold labels; inspecting for logic, not just formatting | — |
| 4 | Figures, tables, references | Figures, tables, citations, and cross-references in Quarto; the LaTeX checkpoint | LaTeX checkpoint conference (required) |
| 5 | LaTeX Project draft week | Paper pick, scope, one-page outline | — |
| 6 | LaTeX Project | Studio time for the project | — |
| 7 | R foundations in VS Code | Vectors, data frames, dplyr basics; R + Quarto inside VS Code |
R transition conference (required) |
| 8 | Visualization with ggplot2 |
Data, aesthetics, geoms, labels, and plots as evidence | — |
| 9 | Simulation and reproducibility | set.seed(), repeated trials, and sampling behavior |
— |
| 10 | R Project | Studio time for the project | R Project conference (required) |
| 11 | AI module I — debugging and verification | Prompting, scoping, verifying, citation hygiene | — |
| 12 | AI module II — drafting and critique | Drafting prose, catching hallucinations, critique | — |
| 13 | Workflow bridge / second-tool exploration | Light Sage / Python / Octave / CAS exploration; portfolio polish | Portfolio-workflow conference (required) |
| 14 | Portfolio assembly | Optional open studio and final-polish support | — |
| 15 | Final polish and portfolio close-out | Optional open studio | — |
How to use this schedule
- Read by row. Each row gives the week’s topic, what the scheduled studio time focuses on if you attend, and whether the week includes a required conference.
- Weekly work distribution. Weekly work is distributed through the Assignments/LMS space. Exact prompts, rubrics, due dates, and submission details live there.
- Dates live in the LMS. This site only shows “Week 1, Week 2, …” so it stays useful across terms. The course LMS is the authoritative source for conference sign-ups and section-specific due dates.
See the Syllabus for the grading framework, drop policy, late-work rule, conference detail, and other course-wide policies.