CPSC 221

The main feature of this course template is a landing page with a schedule table allowing students to navigate to all the course materials. Website is automatically deployed using GH Actions to GitHub Pages.

This site is based on the course-template used by UBC-CS/ai-100.

Edit the template

There are a few things you need to do to adapt this template for your course.

1. In _variables.yml, fill in the <TODO-...> placeholders — course code/title/term/dates, instructor contact, building/room, and links (Canvas, PrairieLearn, etc.). Variables are used across the entire Quarto project using the shortcode {{< var <key> >}} (reference sub-keys with ., e.g. course.code; more details). course.monday-of-the-first-term-week must be set (format YYYY-MM-DD) since it's used to calculate dates in the schedule table.

2. The _quarto.yml file controls Quarto project settings including website options (such as navigation). Fill in the <TODO-...> sidebar resource links.

3. To enable the schedule table, provide week numbers and day of the week for each unit in /data/schedule.csv.

4. Any extra resources that aren't Quarto documents (e.g. lecture recordings, PrairieLearn links) go in /data/additional-resources.csv.

5. index.qmd (syllabus) and schedule.qmd still contain <!-- TODO --> markers where CPSC 221-specific content needs to be written in.

Website notes

The course schedule is dynamically generated from the files in the directories pre-activities, activities, slides and summaries using R (specifically, render_schedule() in /R/render-schedule.csv). Having documents organized this way allows them to be formatted with _metadata.yml files in their directories.

• There are six different types of <unit>s: part, week, lecture, discussion, potw and exam.
• There are the following <types> of resources: summaries, pre-activities, activities, slides, recording, practice and link.
• All resources belonging together have a unique <id> consisting of their <unit> followed by a two-digit number, e.g., lecture-01.
• Files belonging to one unit should be named following the pattern: <id>_<type>.
• id is a unique identifier to join resources for all related resources to generate the schedule table.
• The titles of part documents are used as headings in the course schedule.

Setup

Quarto and R need to be installed locally to render the site (quarto render or quarto preview). Python dependencies are managed with uv; R dependencies with renv.

Different versions of the website are rendered to different subdirectories by defining Quarto project profiles. To render a profile, it has to be added to the GitHub Actions step (.github/workflows/main.yml).

Target audience	Quarto project profile(s)	Website subdirectory	Content	Lesson plans
Student	student	/	Do not show future weeks	No
Student with accessibility needs	student,access	/access	Do not show future weeks	No
Instructor	instructor	/instructor	All	Yes
Teaching assistant (TA)	ta	/ta	All	Yes
Coordinator	coordinator	/coordinator	All	Yes

Attribution

The course template can be found at https://github.com/stephan-koenig/course-template and is based on:

• STA 199 by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
• ESPM 157 by Carl Boettinger
• STA 112 by Lucy D'Agostino McGowan
• PMAP 8521 by Andrew Heiss

Some slides design was adapted from:

• rstudio::conf-2022 Workshop on Quarto by Tom Mock et al.