Course Policies: CS 104: Applied Programming at Calvin College

Instructor: Patrick M. Bailey (Email: pmb4@calvin.edu ) (and Professor Victor Norman for some labs)

Course Text:

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

This book is an open-source, online, interactive textbook. No registration required.

Other Required Resource: Registration ($25) to the online problem set site Turings Craft CodeLab. Information about this will be given in the first lab.

Grading: Your grade in this course will be determined as follows:

• Reading Quizzes: 10%
• Labs: 35%
  • We will usually do 2 labs each Lab Period. You should be able to finish most of them during class time.
  • We will also do "Predictive Activities" in which we'll speculate on how to solve programming problems that the next week's reading will explore.
• TuringsCraft CodeLab: 10%
  • To receive full credit, they must be done before lab each week, completely and correctly. Partial credit is given if most are done, all are done late, etc. For those of you with lab on Tuesdays, they must be done before midnight on Thursday.
• Exams: 45%
  • Test 1: 10%
  • Test 2: 15%
  • Test 3 (final exam): 20%
  • Test are cumulative -- i.e., everything on Test 1 will be testable on Test 2, etc.
    

Course Organization:

Tuesday:

• Reading Quiz: 3 to five questions usually. If you are late to class, you may miss this and lose points.
• I will introduce the Learning Objectives for the week -- these are the concepts that you should understand by the end of the week, and which were covered in the reading. All Learning Objectives are here.
• Short lectures interspersed with problems ("Peer-instruction").
• You will be assigned to work through a set of online exercises on turingscraft.com. These are due by lab time on Thursday. (Thursday 11:59:59.999pm, for those with lab on Tuesday.)

Thursday (2 hr lab) (Tuesday 2 hr lab, for some):

• Sections are split between me and Professor Norman - we follow the same instructions Professor Norman wrote.
• We will meet in SB 337 ("Systems Lab").
• We may go over some of the TuringsCraft exercises.
• We will work on the weekly lab assignments.
• In general, do not plan on going to whatever lab section you want to. There are ~21 assigned to each lab section and there are 23 seats in the lab.

Friday, Saturday, or Monday:

• You do the reading for the next week.

Policies:

Attendance: attendance is optional. However, you will do poorly if you skip class regularly (this has been proven time and time again). If you miss a quiz, you will receive a 0. If you will miss class due to illness or some other legitimate reason, you must inform me (via email: pmb4@calvin.edu) before class that you will miss class that day.

Late assignments: Due dates for assignments will be in moodle, although in general, assignments are not submitted via moodle. Assignments are due at midnight on the due date.  Assignments that are submitted within 1 business day after the due date will have 10% deducted.  2 business days = 20%, 3 days = 30%, etc.

A word to the wise: Note that people who are new to computer programming sometimes think they can do an assignment at the last minute and get it working.  But, computer programming is not like writing a paper, where you can have undeveloped or faulty arguments, missing sections, etc., and still have something that is “pretty good”.  In computer programming, if something isn’t working, you can’t fake it and hope for the best.  It either works or it doesn’t, and it is often very easy to tell…

Office Hours / Help outside of class: I will inform you of official office hours, but generally, I am happy to help you whenever I am in my office.

Disability statement: Calvin will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented disabilities. Students should notify the Coordinator of Services to Students with Disabilities located in Student Academic Services, HH455. Students should notify their instructors within the first two weeks of class.

Working together:  You may work in pairs when doing the lab assignments. You may, and often should, collaborate in discussion, design, and debugging for projects.  However, you must write your own code for the homework.