The CS1951t TA Handbook

The course wiki runs on Google Sites, and contains:

• Student journals, used for logging hours, hosting presentations, project planning, and to chronicle project progress.

• A course homepage, which outlines the theme of the course, course policies, the course syllabus, and other useful links.

• A slew of software reviews, descriptions, and tutorials.

• Information on VR, AR, and large display hardware.

• Archives of past course homepages.

Though not exhaustive, this list indicates the importance of the wiki. As a TA, you will be responsible for generating the course homepage, refactoring the wiki, updating the course timeline, and serving as general tech support for any wiki issue. See the TA Camp & Course Scheduling section of the handbook for a more detailed overview of your responsibilities.

You may wonder, why are we using Google Sites to host the wiki? Google Sites is easy to use (no HTML / CSS hacking required), supports a wide variety of embedded media (e.g. spreadsheets, videos, photos), and has a nice hierarchy for organizing pages. The downsides: it’s sometimes slow and supports only a limited set of version control features. As a TA camp project, you may consider migrating the wiki to another hosting service, but be warned that this is a non-trivial endeavor.

We use Slack for course communication and announcements. While it’s nice to schedule activities through the wiki, students are much more responsive to Slack messages! We also use Slack to give students feedback on project proposals / presentations, resolve tech issues, and to schedule office hours. Here’s a nice template for setting up a course Slack workspace:

1. Generate the usual channels: #Official, #Help, and #Random. All course announcements should go through #Official. All tech support issues should be posted to #Help.

2. Generate group DMs for each student and add David Laidlaw to each of these. These channels are useful for giving private feedback or responding to private issues.

As a TA, you’ll be responsible for setting up the course Slack workspace. The URL for the workspace should be of the form: cs1951t-<ADD YEAR>.slack.com.

Building, testing, and evaluating VR software is graphics-intensive and requires a specific suite of software. As expected, very few students come into the class already having access to a laptop with sufficient power. To resolve this, we rent gpu-accelerated virtual desktops for each student using Paperspace. Paperspace is a cloud computing platform, similar to AWS or Azure. Paperspace's main advantage is that it supports a variety of machine templates designed specifically for gaming; this means that key software and drivers often come preinstalled with most machines! Paperspace’s main disadvantage is that it can be buggy and certain machine types may not be available during peak times. During TA camp, you might consider switching to a different cloud computing platform.

As a TA you will be responsible for:

1. Selecting an appropriate machine type for the class. Paperspace supports a wide variety of machine types. In short, the machine should have an NVIDIA GPU with 8GB of VRAM, 100GB of storage, and should utilize the Parsec template. In Spring 2022, we used an A4000 machine based on the Parsec template.

2. Generating a template for the class. This template should include an updated suite of GPU drivers for the machine, Steam (already included in Parsec template), the Virtual Desktop streamer, Oculus SDK, and Visual Studio Community (with the C++ development package installed).

3. Creating a Paperspace machine for each student. This typically happens during the first or second week of class.

4. Providing tech support. Paperspace is not perfect and sometimes has weird software / networking issues. Being generally comfortable with the platform is necessary.

Please see the Paperspace Guide for more details about how Paperspace works.

To connect a VR headset to a Paperspace machine, we need Virtual Desktop. Virtual Desktop consists of two components: a client and a streamer. The client relays headset actions (e.g. controller and head movements) to the Paperspace machine. On receiving events from the client, the streamer responds to these actions and returns a rendered frame to the client. From the user’s point of view, they can control and run programs on their Paperspace machine using only their headset. This enables graphics-intensive games to run on the Oculus Quest 2 and other standalone VR headsets. Students are typically required to purchase Virtual Desktop in the Oculus store at the beginning of the semester.

At the beginning of the semester, students receive a loaner VR headset to support their work over the semester. Since Spring 2021, we’ve used Oculus Quest 2 headsets. As of writing this, we have approximately sixteen Oculus Quest 2 headsets that students can borrow. You’ll be responsible for distributing these headsets to students; when checking a headset out, you should record the headset’s serial number along with the name of the student borrowing it. In the past, we’ve used the grading spreadsheet (see Section 6) to record this information. After receiving their headset, students will be required to go through the setup process. Detailed setup instructions can be found here. As a TA, you’ll be responsible for ensuring that these instructions are up to date. In addition, be prepared for students to ask you questions about the setup process (e.g. replacing batteries and installing updates).

Throughout the semester, students will engage in discussions, participate in in-class activities, give feedback to other students, among other activities. In past semesters, we’ve found it useful to have a persistent space for recording these interactions, which we call “the Course Board.” The board is a Google Docs that’s shared with all students. The doc is ordered chronologically. See here for an example As a TA, you’ll be responsible for refactoring the Course Board and ensuring that students add entries to the board, when appropriate.

5 - Validating Course Demos

Demos and in-class activities are a core component of CS 1951t. As a TA, you’ll be responsible for leading at least one in-class demo during the first month of the semester. Over the past several semesters, the course staff has developed a set of core course demos:

DinoVR

Paraview + Ben Volume Rendering

You’re responsible for ensuring that these demos are still functional before the start of the semester. Depending on time constraints and the course theme, you may even consider building new demos for the course!

5 - Grading

Students in CS 1951t are graded based on the following (non-exhaustive) criteria:

Journal quality

Throughout the semester, students are required to maintain a well-ordered journal. At the top level, a journal should contain links to project proposals, presentations, and wiki deliverables. All wiki deliverables should also contain the student’s name. Moreover, every student should log all of the hours they work outside of class in their journal. This log should be ordered by date, and each entry should contain the number of hours / minutes worked and a brief description of what the student did. Students are expected to log at least 140 hours per semester, which averages to ~10 hours per week. The total number of hours logged should be listed near the top of the journal. Try to review some of the journals from prior years to get a better understanding of what a complete journal should look like.

Class participation

CS 1951t is a seminar-like course. Consequently, course participation is heavily weighted when determining a student’s grade. Throughout the course, students are expected to engage in course discussions, give several presentations on project updates, and participate in in-class activities. As a TA, you’ll be expected to keep track of student participation. In the past, we’ve found it helpful to log this information in a shared spreadsheet. Reach out to Professor Laidlaw for more information on this.

Final presentation quality

At the end of the semester, students will be required to give a final presentation. The format of this presentation varies year-by-year, but in general students are expected to create a poster and prepare a brief talk about their projects. Students are expected to put a reasonable amount of effort into their final presentations and are graded accordingly.

Final grades are compiled at the end of the semester.