Class meeting time: Tues/Thurs 11-12:30, GCB 209.
Lab meeting times: Mon 10-11 and Mon 11-12AM in the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory, EMA 304. Labs will not be held on January 19 (holiday).
Instructor:
Prof. John W. Byers
Email: byers @ cs . bu . edu
Phone: 617-353-8925
Office Hours: Tues 3-4:30 and Thurs 1:30-3, held in MCS 270
Teaching Fellow: Ashwin Thangali
Email: tvashwin @ cs . bu . edu
Office Hours: Mon and Wed 4-5:30 in EMA 302 (CS Undergrad lab).
Labs: Mon 10-11 and 11-12, held in EMA 304.
Click here for the lab homepage.
Prerequisites: This course is designed for students who already program with a CS 111 level of proficiency in Java. If you do not have significant previous exposure to programming, then you are requested to transfer to CS 111. Please speak to us right away if you are not sure if your programming background is adequate.
Textbooks: The required textbook is:
Topics: We will no doubt drift from any formalized plan, but a rough schedule of where we are headed is provided in the roadmap below. A more detailed and continually updated schedule will be maintained on the main course homepage.
Workload: Be forewarned -- the workload in this course will be heavy. To master the conceptual material covered in lecture and to become expert at implementing applications built upon basic data structures, there will be substantial programming assignments due approximately every other week.
Grading: The course grade will break down as follows:
Honors Section: The honors section of this course will conduct a semester-long group project orchestrated by the instructor. We will meet periodically throughout the semester at the lab time slot, Mon 4-5, at a place convenient for all of the participants. Honors students must attend one of the regular 112 lab sections, as this material will not be covered in the honors section.
Exams: There will be one eighty minute in-class midterm held during the middle of the semester in early March, probably Thursday, March 5. The cumulative final will be held during the normal two-hour final exam slot, whose time is still TBD. Please make your end-of-semester travel plans accordingly. In the event of serious illness documented by a doctor's note, makeup examinations will be given orally.
Homework Assignments and Submission: We will have regular programming assignments due roughly every other week. We will post general guidelines that we will use to grade your assignments. Other specific guidelines will be provided on a per-assignment basis. To submit your assignments you must use the gsubmit program, usage of which will be covered in lab. All assignments will be tested for originality by an automated software tool.
Attendance: It is expected that you will attend lecture and the laboratory section for this course and I will often take attendance at the beginning of lecture. Material covered in lecture and lab may not be covered by our textbooks. I also ask that you arrive in class on time, since it is highly disruptive to have students flowing in throughout the class period. Moreover, when students are at a borderline between grades, I will check the attendance records before making a final determination.
Late Policy: Programming assignments are typically due Thursdays at 10PM. During the course, you will have two opportunities to turn in an assignment up to 24 hours late with no penalty. No additional time will be granted, nor will additional late submissions be granted. As you likely already know, programming a fully functional solution to an assignment (even after you have mastered the key concepts) can take more time than you expect, so plan to finish a few days early.
CAS Academic Conduct Code: Academic standards and the code of academic conduct are taken very seriously by our university, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Computer Science. Course participants must adhere to the CAS Academic Conduct Code -- please take the time to review this document if you are unfamiliar with its contents.
Collaboration Policy: The work that you submit must be your own original work and it is an act of plagiarism to represent the work of another as your own. You are welcome to discuss the general nature of programming assignments with other students in the course, but it is not acceptable to collaborate by working side-by-side in the lab, nor by writing lines of code or pseudocode together, nor by sharing or copying code. Any discussion or collaboration with other students in the course must also be acknowledged in your submission. If you are uncertain whether an action constitutes a violation of the collaboration policy, I will be glad to discuss the matter with you.