Study the assigned readings from How to Design Programs (HtDP) ahead of time.

If you have questions, write them down. If these questions don’t get covered, ask in class and/or meet with the tutors, teaching assistants, or your professor.

Attempt to solve the exercises in the assigned reading. If the solution is obvious, skip the exercise; otherwise tackle it.

Unlike your high school texts in math (or CS for that matter), HtDP exercises do not follow a copy-and-modify pattern. They are about applying the design recipe to a variety of scenarios and learning to see which design recipe applies.

Attend the lecture and the labs.

Lectures tell you what you should have understood up to this point.

Lab illustrate the point of the week with hands-on examples and practice code reviews, a highly valuable co-op skill.

Keep up.

Experience proves that students who fall behind quickly drop out. So, keep up with the readings, the exercises, and the homework assignments.

Talk to the course staff.

If the lecture and the notes leave you with questions on the material, see your teacher(s) during office hours or make an appointment. Mark the passages in the book(s) that you haven’t understood and prepare questions that express what you haven’t understood.

Talk to the course staff.

Talk to the course staff.

Did we mention that you ought to talk to the course staff?