General Information

Labs

The labs start the first full week of class, on Friday, January 10.

Lab		Instructor		Time		Days		Location
1		Vyshnavi Chunduru		8-9:40am		F		WVH 212
1		Kyle Crampton		8-9:40am		F		WVH 212
3		Annie Dinh		9:50-11:30am		F		WVH 212
3		Jack Warren		9:50-11:30am		F		WVH 212
4		Parker Griep		9:50-11:30am		F		WVH 210
4		Julian Zucker		9:50-11:30am		F		WVH 210
5		Sidney La Fontaine		11:45am-1:25pm		F		WVH 210
5		Jack Mastrangelo		3:25-5:05pm		F		WVH 210
6		Khalil Haji		1:35-3:15pm		F		WVH 210
6		Iman Moreira		1:35-3:15pm		F		WVH 210
7		Chase Bishop		11:45am-1:25pm		F		WVH 210
7		Melina Young		3:25-5:05pm		F		WVH 210

You signed up for a lab section during registration. You must attend the lab section for which you are registered.

The purpose of labs is to give you hands-on experience with the actual tools, and to explain some of the principles from lecture with hands-on examples.

Computing Environment

We will use DrRacket 7.5 (the most recent version), a programming environment for a family of programming languages. We will use the HtDP teaching languages plus a small number of teachpacks. DrRacket is installed on Khoury computers (if you encounter an older version, rest assured it will be upgraded soon; the differences need not concern you).We strongly recommend you install DrRacket on your own computer so that you can work on CS 2500 wherever, whenever you like. It is also freely available on the web in case you wish install it on your own computer. Please use the version number mentioned above.

DrRacket runs on most popular platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other *nixes). Programs written in the teaching languages have mostly the same behavior on all platforms. You therefore do not need to worry what kind of machine you use when you run your programs.

All that being said, should you have issues installing DrRacket on your machine, you may use the college’s virtual desktop infrastructure. We do, however, strongly recommend installing and using DrRacket on your own computer.

Khoury Account

In order to submit homeworks and lab quizzes in this class, you will need to have a Khoury account. You are eligible for such an account if you are a Khoury major, or if you are in a Khoury class (such as this one). You can apply for a Khoury account at this link, and you should do so during the first week of class, so that you have the account activated by the day of the first lab.

Homeworks

The purpose of the homeworks is to give you hands-on experience with the course material you learned in lecture and lab, as well as to prepare you for the exam. There will be one homework per week, usually due Thursdays at 9pm.

Make it a high priority to not fall behind on homework: the course is fast-paced and presents new material every lecture day, making catching up harder and harder.

However, we know that your time is not always easily scheduled, and sometimes “stuff happens.” We will therefore allow you to turn in your work up to 20 hours after the deadline, at a 5% per hour penalty. The handin server blocks any submission even 20-hours-and-one-second after the deadline, and it will use its own clock to determine what time it is, so it is a bad idea to try to sneak in a submission in those last few seconds.

Pair Programming

Starting about a month into the semester, you must work on your graded homeworks in assigned pairs (note: pair, not with my friends). Your partner will be a classmate in the same lab as you; your lab TA will assign you the first partner. We will switch partners once (see syllabus).

Pair programming means that you and your partner work on the homeworks jointly. You read them together, and you work on the solutions together. One of the labs’ purposes is to teach you how to work in pairs effectively, which will prepare you to be an effective part of a software-development team in your co-op or job. The rough idea is this: One of you plays pilot, the other co-pilot. The pilot guides the discussion, talking through the problem and asking questions about anything that is unclear. The co-pilot works on the keyboard and explains aloud what is going on. After a problem is solved to the satisfaction of both, you switch roles.

Exams

The exams will test material similar to that assigned in the weekly problem sets. If you can solve every homework problem on your own, you are ready for the exams. If not, you need to work harder to get there.

You may bring one piece of paper to the exam, double sided, with anything written or typed on it that you want. We are limiting you in this way because (a) writing this one sheet of paper is an excellent way to study, and (b) we have found that, in the past, the more papers students bring to the exam, the worse they do. We want you to focus on the exam, not on shuffling through everything you’ve ever written.

Lengths of the exams: The material in Exam 1 is designed for a length of 1h; for Exam 2, for a length about about 1.5h. "But there is a discrepancy between these lengths and the actual exam times as scheduled above!?" A student who has worked through the readings and homework problems can solve the exam problems in 1h/1.5h, resp. To make sure that nobody feels rushed, however, we allocate twice that time for all students, in case anyone feels they need time during the exam to double-check their work.

Grades

The "instructor’s discretion" grade component is used, among other things, to reward students for active participation in the course (not just attending every class), and—in exceptional situations—those who made a noteworthy commitment to the course work or the improvement of the course over the semester.