Week 1 — Your first render

Source files, rendered outputs, and Quarto as the course container

A short conceptual reading to accompany the Week 1 setup work. The hands-on walkthrough lives in Lab 1 — Install the stack.

The first week of this course is the workflow launch. The point is not “learn Quarto deeply.” The point is to get the whole chain working end-to-end:

source file → render → rendered artifact → portfolio folder → Setup conference

Everything that follows in the course — typeset math, R analyses, simulation reports, AI-assisted drafts, the final portfolio — flows through that same chain.

Source files vs rendered outputs

A source file is text you can edit. In this course your source files end in .qmd (a Quarto document) or .tex (a LaTeX document). The source file is the thing you write, the thing you keep, and the thing that should be able to rerun on any computer.

A rendered output is what the source produces. For Quarto, the typical outputs are an HTML page and a PDF. For LaTeX, the typical output is a PDF. The rendered output is for reading; it is not the source of truth. If you lose a rendered PDF you can produce a new one by re-rendering the source. If you lose the source, you cannot turn a PDF back into editable form — what you have is what you have.

That asymmetry is why the source file is the artifact in this course. The rendered PDF is the evidence that the source works.

Rendering as verification

Rendering is not just a final step. It is the verification that your source actually says what you think it says. If your source claims to display the quadratic formula but the PDF shows raw text with dollar signs, the source has a bug. If your source claims to run an R simulation but the rendered output has no plot, the source has a bug.

The working rhythm throughout the course:

Edit the source.
Render.
Look at the rendered output.
If something does not match what you intended, fix the source and render again.

Most “this doesn’t work” moments in technical work resolve to “render, then look at what you actually produced.” Make rendering cheap and frequent for yourself.

Why Quarto is the course container

You will write Quarto documents in almost every week of this course because Quarto is the thing that holds everything else together:

Markdown for prose,
$ ... $ for inline math and $$ ... $$ for displayed math,
fenced code blocks that run R inline,
citations that resolve against a bibliography,
a single render command that produces clean HTML or PDF output.

You will not become a Quarto expert in Week 1. You will become one slowly, by writing Quarto documents every week of the course. The Week 1 job is just to get the engine started.

In this course you edit those Quarto documents in VS Code (Visual Studio Code), the course’s standard editor. The install lab walks through setting up VS Code together with R, Quarto, and TinyTeX.

The portfolio folder is organized technical work

Your math-software-portfolio/ folder is where the term’s work lives. It is a single place you can come back to — at the end of Week 4, in the middle of the LaTeX Project, when assembling the final portfolio in Week 15 — and find everything in a sensible layout.

The folder convention is described on the Software setup → Folder convention page. The Week 1 job is to create the folder, drop your first rendered document into it, and start the habit of keeping each weekly piece in its own subfolder with both source and rendered output present.

AI as first-pass help, not final authority

You may use AI assistants from Week 1 forward for explanation, debugging, syntax lookup, and drafting. Two ideas to carry from the start:

AI is a first pass, not a verdict. A friendly-sounding answer from an assistant is a draft that you then check by compiling, running, looking at the output, and reading the official documentation. The full course position lives in the AI use guidelines.
Disclosure plus verification. Every submission where AI was used includes a short AI Use Note with three labeled lines: Tool, Purpose, Verification. The verification line is the load-bearing one — it is the evidence that you did not just accept output uncritically.

In Week 1 the AI Use Note can be short. The format stays the same all term; only the depth grows.

The Setup conference

The Week 1 Setup conference is the first workflow checkpoint and the first one-on-one of the course. It is not a quiz. It is a 10–15 minute conversation that confirms:

your software stack works,
your portfolio folder is set up,
you can rerender your first document cleanly from scratch,
you know where to submit and where to find the gradebook.

If anything in the install was hard, the conference is where we name it and fix it. Conference sign-ups and the exact submission details live in the course LMS.