CS112: Introduction to Computer Programming (Spring 2017)

Section 004/005

1 Course Basics

Meeting Time and Location:

• Section 004: MW 1:30-2:45pm, ENGR Bldg 1101
• Section 005: MW 3:00-4:15pm, ENGR Bldg 1101

Instructors: 

Course Outcomes:

• An ability to use procedural programming language concepts including expressions, decision statements, simple data types, Boolean logic, input/output, loop constructs, and procedures.
• An ability to combine programming techniques to solve problems of varying degrees of difficulty.
• An ability to refine computer programs through testing and debugging to ensure proper operation.
• An ability to find and understand programming language documentation to learn new information needed to solve programming problems.

Prerequisite:

C or better in MATH 104, 105, or 113 (or sufficient score on the math placement test). Corequisite: CS Majors must also be enrolled in CS 101 this semester.

1.1 Textbook: ZyBook

• Required - Zyante online textbook.
  
• Sign up at Zyante.
• Enter zyBook code: GMUCS112Spring2017
• Subscribe using any credit card
• Quite optional - The Practice of Computing Using Python by William Punch & Richard Enbody © 2011. An eText version is available.
  

1.2 In-class participation: Top Hat

• This is a clicker-alternative required for class participation. Use your GMU email address to sign up. The subscription is $24 for 4-month and other options are also available.
  
• Any web-enabled device can be used for this - a smartphone, a laptop, iPad, etc.
  
• Note that attempting to answer questions from home is not permitted. Any or all of your class participation score may be forfeited if we catch you doing so.
• You need to sign up with the specific join code for your section of the course.
  
• Section 004 (Prof. Russell):737848.
• Section 005 (Prof. Zhong): 964061.

1.3 Discussion board: Piazza

• Course schedule, announcements, lecture slides, assignments, discussion. GTA/UTA contacts and office hours will be on Piazza too.
• All correspondence will go through Piazza. You can send private messages to the instructors (visible to all professors, GTAs, and UTAs) as well as post public questions visible to all students, collaborate on responses, and tag everything by topic.
• Unless you have a confidential matter to discuss directly with an individual professor/TA, please do not email us directly -- use a private piazza post or visit in person. Project help questions sent via email are of extremely low priority, as they were sent to the wrong place.
• No sharing answers or code solutions to assignments on the discussion board. See Honor code section below for more details.
  

1.4 Blackboard

• Grades will be posted to Blackboard.
• Projects and most lab assignments will be submitted (per published deadlines) via Blackboard.

2 Grading

Assessment

• A+ (>= 98.0%) A (>= 92.0%) A– (>= 90.0%)
• B+ (>= 88.0%) B (>= 82.0%) B– (>= 80.0%)
• C+ (>= 78.0%) C (>= 72.0%) C– (>= 70.0%)
• D (>= 60.0%)
• F (< 60.0%)
• There will be no make-up or extra-credit assignments at the end of the semester; your grade should be a measure of your semester-long progress.

2.1 Projects

Programming projects will be a primary focus of your grade - each one should take multiple sessions of coding, with questions asked in between. This is the practice you need to learn, master, and internalize various concepts of the course. Don't be surprised if you're spending 5-20 hours on each one. All project grades will be averaged together evenly.

• Submission

• All projects are to be submitted to Blackboard. You can submit your work an unlimited number of times to BlackBoard, and by default only the last version will be graded.
  
• Turning in the wrong files will likely result in a zero. You can and should download your submitted attempts to verify that you turned in a working copy.
  

• Deadline

• Projects can be turned in at most 48 hours late, no exceptions.
  
• Each 24-hour period entered after the deadline lowers the maximum score by 25% (not quite the same as a 25% penalty).
  
• Each student gets three One-Late-Day tokens, which are automatically used by late submissions to avoid the 25% penalty; you still must turn in work within 48 hours of the original deadline, even if you use tokens! (note that you can't use three tokens on a single project)
• The last project might not be allowed to be turned in late, to facilitate end-of-semester grading.
  
• Tokens are only allowed on projects; they can't be used on labs.
  
• Unused late-tokens will be worth a small bounty at the semester's end (0.25% of the semester grade).
  
• Blackboard being unavailable is not an excuse for turning in a late assignment; in the rare situation that the website is somehow unavailable or giving the student an error, the student MUST email their submission to their GTA before the deadline, otherwise it will be considered late.
• Catastrophic computer failure will not be cause for an extension. Use a backup service such as DropBox (or any cloud service), emailing yourself, storing to a USB drive, whatever it takes. Every semester multiple students' computers die, are stolen, or otherwise 'lose' projects. Don't be the student who forgot to (frequently) back up your work!

• Broken Code == Bad Scores
  

• After the first two projects, any code turned in that does not run (immediately crashes due to errors), specifically on Python 3.4, will receive at most 50%. No exceptions. At this point, if the grader is able to quickly fix your code, you might get some points back. If the grader cannot immediately spot and fix the issue, you'll be fortunate to get any points at all.
  
• Turning in code that runs is a big deal!

• Honor code

• Programming projects are considered individual efforts, therefore no sharing of code and/or discussion of problem solutions are allowed with anyone except the TAs or the professor. Student projects will be manually and automatically assessed for cheating. You may not look at or otherwise view any other individual's code, pseudocode, or algorithms.
  
• You may not use any Internet resources to create code or algorithms, besides the textbooks, the slides, and Piazza, unless otherwise specified. However, you are free to look up the syntax errors your encounter online, to gain an understanding of what the syntax error means. The projects we're doing this semester can be directly solved using techniques discussed in class, and no outside material is needed unless otherwise noted.
• It is your responsibility to lock your computers with a password, to not post your code to websites like Pastebin that are publicly accessible, to guard your USB drives and computers, to not upload your files to someone else's computer, etc. You will be liable for any access gained to your code.
  

2.2 Labs

• All lab assessment grades will be averaged together. Lab assessments will be weekly exercises, tasks, or quizzes, to be completed during lab or before the specified due time.
  
• Lab quizzes and tasks require attendance at the designated lab time to get the credit.
  
• Any missed lab assessment is simply missed, regardless of the reason why (travel, illness, work, traffic, receiving a major award, getting married, saving the universe, etc.).  Two lowest lab grades will be dropped to cover the very rare cases of understandable missed labs.
  
• If you choose to miss some early on, and later on have to miss for some understandable reason, that is too bad. Try to save the drops so you can actually throw out a bad grade, and not just hide a lazy zero. Pretending you don't have them is your best approach.
  

2.3 Zyante

• Zyante readings are graded based on the completion percentage of activities before the designated deadline of each chapter.
• See the schedule page on Piazza for reading assignment due date.
  
• Make sure you're logged in to get credit for reading completion.
• Optional subsections are not considered for Zyante grading.

2.4 Exams

• Exams are closed book/notes unless specified otherwise by instructor. They will be entirely paper and pencil - no computers.
• All students must have their GMU identification available on testing days.
  
• The final exam is cumulative. If you perform better on the final exam than a previous test, we will replace the test grade with the final grade.
• If you know in advance that you are unable to make an exam for a valid and unavoidable reason (such as a scheduled surgery, etc), you must notify the professor at least one week before the scheduled exam date to make arrangements for a make-up, and bring documentation with you when you take the make-up.
  
• If you miss an exam due to a university-accepted excused absence (such as an illness or car accident the day and time of the exam), you must notify your professor within 24 hours of your absence to make arrangements for a makeup, and bring approved documentation with you when you take the make-up exam. Failure to follow either of these policies will result in a zero. We may also elect to allow the final exam to count the extra amount to give you a sort of do-over.
• The final will not be given early. You are starting the course with knowledge of the schedule (see GMU's Final Exam Calendar for the latest schedule, updated as weather events require).
  
• Per departmental policy, a failing grade on the final exam (<60.0%) will result in a failing grade (F) for the entire course, regardless of performance on other assignments. You must pass the final exam to pass the course.
  

2.5 Contested Grades

• If you feel points have been incorrectly deducted, contact the grader. For all projects and lab work, that is your GTA. For the tests and final exam, that is your professor.
• Contesting of grades on any/all submissions must be requested within one week of receiving the grade (on BlackBoard). No grade changes will be considered subsequent to that deadline.

3 Office hours and discussion board

Office hours

• For students seeking help with programming assignments during office hours, students must identify the line number, through debug print statements, where they believe an error to be before seeing the TA or instructor. This implies that you must have at least one test case that fails, to bring to office hours before the TAs or instructor can help you.
  
• For more general programming assignment questions, students must bring their own pseudocode to office hours before the TA or professor can help you.
  
• Under no circumstances will the professor or GTA reveal more than three lines of code at a time during office hours. Students must make significant, individual effort on all projects before coming to see a GTA/professor. Waiting until the last minute, in the expectations that the entire project will be explained in one office hours session, is not feasible.
• Office hours are often crowded - do not rely on them for last minute help, as we cannot guarantee that we will be able to spend significant time with every student. You can also use the discussion board for posting questions.

• Students are encouraged to use the discussion board, Piazza, to ask and answer questions. Responses to questions can be expected within 24 hours, and often times much sooner.
• The discussion board on Piazza is required reading for all projects. You MUST read the discussion board for clarifications and project updates.
• Students can post questions and code privately, although the instructor reserves the right to make any post public, so that other students can see the responses.
  
• For students wishing to post their code privately to Piazza, the same rules apply as when coming to office hours; if you have code written, you must produce at least one failing test case where you have identified what line number is giving you problems.

4 Honor Code

• All students are expected to abide by the GMU Honor Code. This policy is rigorously enforced. Cheating will be prosecuted and result in a notification of the Honor Committee as outlined in the GMU Honor Code. Sharing, collaboration, or looking at any code or algorithm related to programming projects that is not your own is considered cheating.

• The computer science department has an CS Honor Code Policies that you are subject to particularly for our course. The document helps you to understand how GMU honor code applies to programming and CS, what constitutes cheating in the CS setting. It clarifies some scenarios that are unique to our sorts of assignments. Make sure you read and familiarize yourself with these rules.
  

• We take the honor code quite seriously. Any attempts at copying or sharing code, algorithms, or other violations of the honor code simply will not be tolerated.  There are definitely opportunities to study, work, and learn together throughout this course - Zyante questions, lab exercises, and more. Mostly you will need to work independently for any sort of "test" and for projects.

• We use automated software to flag suspicious cases, and then review them to find the cases that must be submitted to the Office of Academic Integrity. The penalty for cheating will always be far worse than a zero grade, to ensure it's not worth taking the chance. Confirmed cases of cheating almost always translate into course failure.
  

5 Learning Disabilities

Students with a learning disability or other condition (documented with GMU's Office of Disability Services) that may impact academic performance should speak with the professor ASAP to discuss appropriate accommodations. Even if you don't know whether you plan on utilizing the accommodations for any assignment/test, it's in your best interest to prepare and get documented ahead of time.