Syllabus

Announcements

We will announce important events in the course through Piazza. You must have a Piazza account and be able to receive notifications through Piazza or check it daily.

You can join our Piazza course here: https://piazza.com/class/l7pbb88wlepvh/

Course Components

There are several components to the course:

• Lab sessions
• Lecture sessions
• Weekly quizzes
• Lab reports/portfolio posts
• Skill demonstrations

Labs

The course’s lab component is the main part of the course, which meets for 2 hours on Wednesdays or Thursdays. In each lab you’ll switch between working on your own, working in pairs, and participating in group discussions about your approach, lessons learned, programming problems, and so on.

The lab sessions and groups will be led by TAs and tutors, who will note your participation in these discussions for credit. Note that you must participate, not merely attend, for credit.

Lecture Sessions

Lecture sessions are on Monday and Wednesday. You can only attend the section (12pm or 1pm) to which you are assigned. Depending how things go after the first week or two, we might relax this and allow attendance in either section.

In each lecture, we’ll have a paper handout (also available electronically). At the end of lecture you’ll have a chance submit your handout to Gradescope. You can do this by scanning it in the Gradescope app (for iOS and Android) or through the web interface. To get participation credit for lecture, you have to submit a handout filled in with reasonable effort. It’s fine if answers aren’t right, and some days don’t have right answers. It’s fine if things aren’t totally complete, and some days we won’t finish everything. But it should be obvious that you followed along and completed the exercises we did in class.

If you miss class, you can submit them up until the start of the next class for no penalty up to 10 times – we recommend completing them while watching the podcast. The rest of the times you have to have a submission during the class period. We’ll have TAs on hand as backup to collect the physical paper/help you scan and submit if you have any issue submitting. See Grading below for the required submissions and how that correlates with your grade.

Weekly Quizzes

Each week there will be an online, untimed, multiple-tries quiz due on Wednesday at noon (including week 1). The purpose of this quiz is to make sure everyone has checked in on the concepts we will be using in lab on Wednesday and Thursday. They are open for late submission until the end of the quarter, but see grading below for how late submissions correspond to grades.

Lab Reports/Portfolio Posts

Roughly every two weeks, (weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9) you will write a lab report on work from the previous two weeks, due on Fridays. This will take the form of a blog post on a personal site you created in the first week. At the end of the quarter this means you’ll have a personal web site with 5 posts detailing what you learned.

For each post, our staff will review it and either give full credit or give feedback; you must respond to the feedback to receive full credit on your post. We’ll post specific final deadlines for this feedback with each assignment. In general you will get a final score of 2, 1, or 0. The gradeing section below talks about how this relates to your course grade.

Skill Demonstrations

Twice during the quarter (week 5 and week 10), we will spend lab doing skill demonstrations – this course’s version of exams. In the lab, you’ll spend 10 minutes 1-on-1 with a staff member doing a short demonstration of using some of the skills you’ve learned. You’ll be given a problem to practice in advance, and then in the demo you’ll answer some questions about extending and/or modifying the in-advance task. You can look at the skill demonstrations from previous offerings for a sense of what tasks we assign (though we may or may not use the same types in this offering) [W22 demo 1] [W22 demo 2]

Then, in place of the final exam, you can re-do one or both of these demonstrations if you missed credit on them to make up the missed credit. The final exam may not be exactly the same tasks, but will be similar.

Due to uncertainty around grading resources, the format of the re-do and of the second skill demonstration have changed:

• The first skill demonstration will be re-done asynchronously by you submitting a video of yourself completing the tasks.
• The second skill demonstration will be completed by video and due by Monday of finals week. There will be no opportunity to re-take it; rather, you can have a lot of confidence that you succeeded by crafting your video carefully to match the task. You can work on this together in lab in week 10. Details of the task will be posted on Monday of week 10.

You do not need to plan to attend the scheduled final exam slot for the course, though we may provide that time as an option for scheduling some of the re-do skill demonstrations.

Grading

Each component of the course has a minimum achievement level to get an A, B, or C in the course. You must reach that achievement level in all of the categories to get an A, B, or C. Pluses and minuses will be given around the boundaries of these categories at the instructor’s discretion.

To pass the course, you must fully pass both skill demonstrations.

To pass the course, you must pass one of two skill demonstrations (either initially or with the final make-up).

• A achievement:
  • 6 or more lab participation (there are 8 labs that aren’t skill demonstrations)
  • All quizzes complete and correct, no more than 3 late
  • All but 3 handouts submitted complete, at least 5 on time (used to be allowed up to 10 late, this is clearer)
  • All 5 lab reports completed, at least 4 with full credit/feedback addressed
  • Passing score on both skill demonstrations (either initially or with the final make-up)
• B achievement:
  • 5 or more lab participation
  • 9/10 quizzes complete and correct, no more than 5 late
  • All but 5 handouts submitted, any number can be late (up to the next lecture)
  • At least 4 lab reports completed, at least 2 with full credit/feedback addressed
  • Passing score on one of two skill demonstrations (either initially or with the final make-up)
• C achievement:
  • 4 or more lab participation
  • 7/10 quizzes complete and correct, submitted at any time
  • At least 3 lab reports completed, at least 2 with full credit/feedback addressed
  • Over half of handouts submitted, any number can be late
  • Passing score on one of two skill demonstrations (either initially or with the final make-up)

Consent to Participate in Educational Research

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