Faq on The Art of Computing

Course Mechanics -- Important

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 02:12:01 AEDT

This document summarizes the logistics for participating in Art of Computing and getting credit for it.

All registered student need to read and understand all the content (and information it links to) here. Comments and changes will be incorporated up until the 2nd week of semester.

The goal and position of this course is described here.

Course schedule

The time and location of classes, labs, as well as a weekly breakdown of topics are here.

Course staff and contact

You can find who we are, and how to contact us here.

Assessment scheme and policy

The due dates are specified here, read this for the grading scheme.

Communication and information dissemination

Course communication will be though the following channels.

This website: https://artofcomputing.cecs.anu.edu.au will host basic course information, and important public-facing announcements.
Wattle site for COMP1030
- https://wattlecourses.anu.edu.au/course/view.php?id=19302
- Will be used to host:
  - Course recordings
  - Lab group signup
  - Submit and return assignments
  - Course discussion forum for you to ask and answer questions.

Notes

Students are expected to attend lectures and all tutorials in normal circumstances. The lectures and tutorials/labs are designed as an integral whole and each contain new knowledge and skills that students are expected to master. There are no attendance marks.
We strive to record and archive all lectures using the ANU-wide Echo360 system for students’ benefits. As with many automated systems, recording could go wrong or go missing, we will not try to make up for the missing recordings after the lectures, it is up to you to make up for the material if you’ve missed the lecture (with lecture notes, extra reading, Q&A with lectures/tutors in lab and contact hours, discussing with your peers … ).

Grading Scheme

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:13:58 AEDT

Q: How will I be graded in this class?
A: 50% assignments, best-(N-1)-out-of-N; 5% weekly exercise problems; 45% final exam – required, is a grading hurdle, see below. The rest of this post specifies details.

Grading breakdown

50% assignments, best-(N-1)-out-of-N; 5% weekly exercise problems; 45% final exam.

In order to pass the course, you must have secured ⁵⁰⁄₁₀₀ according to the breakdown above and have attended and scored > 40% for the exam.

Assignments

There will be 8 submitted lab assignments throughout the semester – roughly one assignment per week that consist of a handful of questions. Lab1 and lab2 count as one assignment and are due on Monday of week 3 (see submission). In the rest of this post, N=8.

Your assignment grade is the average from the best N-1 out of these N assignments. In other words, the worst assignment doesn’t count, or you can miss one assignment without penalty.

Weekly exercise problems

We make available a few multiple-choice questions on Wattle with every section of the course. The main purpose is to help you practice computational thinking around each week’s material.

Q: Why 5%? We assign a 5% mark to encourage students to attempt and eventually get all answers right for each problem.

Exam

There will be a final exam held around the end of semester. Its details will be released closer to time. There will be no midterm exam.

Policy

Late assignment submissions: 5% penalty at 24-hour cut-off

Late assignments will not be accepted. However, we understand that sometimes things happen and you may not be able to make it in time despite best efforts.

In case you must be late: There is a hard cut-off of one day (i.e. 24 hours) for each assignment, after which late submission receives no grade. If you submit after the official deadline but before 24 hours have elapsed, your assignment will be graded as-is (say X marks), and you final grade will be 0.95 * X, i.e. part of a day counts as one day.

Your N-1 best assignments are considered graded, and the N-th is considered ungraded. That is to say, you can skip one assignment in the whole semester without penalty.

Collaboration policy

We expect individual assignments. That is, you are expected to write the submitted programs and written assignment independently. The only exception are assignments that explicitly allow pair-programming.

Team work / Pair programming There are a number of assignments where team work (with a team size up to 2) is explicitly permitted. Here is how this works:

You are free to team up with any other student enrolled in this class.
You have to specify in submission comments who you worked with.
The two of you then submit identical files to wattle.
The tutor then grades either copy of the assignment, people in the same team will get the same score.
Both submissions will have to be on-time.

Students are expected to uphold ANU Code of Practice for Student Academic Integrity.

Contact Information

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 10:50:40 AEDT

Information about the COMP1030 team and how to reach us is as follows.

Course website (here)

Is used to host lab sheets and course logistic information.

Course Wattle Site and Contact

https://wattlecourses.anu.edu.au/course/view.php?id=19302

This is used to host lecture slides, sample code, used to handle assignment submissions, and is the primary venue of two-way course communication.

We (course staff) will announce schedule changes and release of key material on the wattle news forum.

We encourage all of you to discuss course-related topics, ask and help answer questions among each other on this forum. This forum will be semi-regularly monitored by tutors and lecturers. Course-related questions that are emailed to us will be responded on the forum when appropriate.

Requests that are meant only for lectures/tutors can be emailed to us clearly marked with “COMP1030” in the subject line – requests without this may get filtered into junk piles and not answered.

Lecturers

Lexing Xie Office: Brian Anderson Building B252

Dirk Pattinson Office: Brian Anderson Building B231

Tutors / Teaching Assistants

Rohit Ram

Siqi Wu

Dawei Chen

Assignment Submission Instructions

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 11:13:58 AEDT

Q: How and when should I submit the assignments?
A: Online, (almost) every Monday 9am …

Assignment due

9am the Monday after the corresponding lecture / tutorial.

Each assignment consist of a small list of tasks that are structured around the corresponding lectures, and we expect many students to be able to complete the weekly assignment in a few hours.

Note:

Lab 1 and 2 are both due on the Monday of week 3.
See here for Grading Scheme, Late Policy and Collaboration Policy.

Submission procedure

Assignment submission and grade returns are done via the course wattle site https://wattlecourses.anu.edu.au/course/view.php?id=19302

Format and Naming of your submission file

When you are done with the assignment, export your blocks.

From Snap!, use the “export blocks” (or export project … ) menu item as necessary, and then copy-paste the xml code into a plain text editor, save it with a filename in the format of

u1234567_labX_*.xml

Here “u1234567” is your ANU UID, “labX” with X=2, 3, 4, … denotes which assignment it is, and the “*” symbol can be any string that help you distinguish the submission file (e.g. final, submit, version3, … ).

Submission in any other format will not be accepted. If you have questions about how to save the submission file, ask the tutors/lecturers for guidance.

Testing your submission

As always, test your submission file – to make sure everything that should be included is indeed (correctly) included!

To do so:

Start a fresh chrome/chronium session
Load the project for the corresponding lab.
Use the “import … ” function from Snap! to load your submission file containing the blocks.

Now run these blocks – make sure they work as expected.

Running Snap! on your laptop?

Enthusiastic Hugo User — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:13:58 AEDT

Q: “Can I run Snap! on my personal computer, or some other computer outside of the lab?”
A: Yes of course! – and we’re including another tip for saving and loading your programs.

Simply point your browser (the latest version of Chrome preferred) to a Snap! instance, such as https://artofcomputing.cecs.anu.edu.au/snap/snap.html and you are good to go!

What you are looking at is a blank Snap! instance, you may wonder how to load/save your work in Snap!, or look at pre-existing programs, as what we did in the warm-up excercise.

Open the Snap! environment via this link, it will automatically load a simple program into the middle gray space. Notice that the ‘program’ consists of a series of blocks colored differently based on their functions. Press the gree flag on its top, or on the upper right-hand-corner of the your browser window to start the program. (With your computer speaker on!), see/hear what happens .

Now open this link, excute the program as above. Can you see/hear how this three-part canon is built from the part above?

The first way is to load the program from a file saved on your computer in so-called xml format. If you click on the paper icon at the upper left hand side of the Snap! window, you will see a menu item that says “Import …” (see picture below). Click on it, and you will be presented with a file chooser. Choose your local xml file, wait, and voila! - the program appears in your workspace.

Now with test your setup with the Canon in the warm-up programs.

Save the program xml somewhere to your computer, e.g. the desktop. http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/demo/kanon.xml.
Load this program via the “Import … ” menu, test that it runs.
Change something in the program, and then user “export project … ” to save your work to disk.

The second way is by encoding the URL that contain the program - i.e., the keyword “#open:” followed by an ULR to the xml file. For example, as was done in the warm-up excercise: http://artofcomputing.cecs.anu.edu.au/snap/snap.html#open:http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/demo/kanon.xml.