Office: 159 Sudikoff
farid@cs.dartmouth.edu
646-2761
CS 1 is the header course for the Computer Science major and minor, and it is one option as the header course for the Digital Arts and Computational Methods minors. CS 1 fulfills the TLA distributive requirement, so you get both your Technology or Applied Science (TAS) credit and your lab credit.
You might think that this course is about computer programming. True, you will do a lot of programming. But that is not what this course is about.
Some day you will be a leader, a decision maker. As computer technology becomes more prevalent and pervasive in society, decision makers increasingly need to understand not just how to use the technology, but also the principles behind it. In this course, you will begin to learn about the principles behind computer technology. You'll start to understand why computers do the things they do.
More broadly, in CS 1 you'll learn to think about problems the way a computer scientist thinks. This skill is valuable in any field.
Hany Farid
Office: 159 Sudikoff
farid@cs.dartmouth.edu
646-2761
In 159 Sudikoff, March 25 through May 29:
If you'd like to meet with me outside of office hours, please contact me and we'll set up a time. Additionally, if my office door is open and I'm not obviously engaged in something, feel free to knock and drop in.
We do not assume that you have prior programming experience. Indeed, historically, most students in CS 1 (and its predecessor, CS 5) came in with no prior programming experience.
In addition, we'll be using a small amount of math. Do you know what it means to square a number? (Yes, of course you recall that it means to multiply the number by itself.) Do you know what a logarithm is? Don't worry about it if you don't remember logarithms, or even if they make you uncomfortable. The way we use them in this course, you'll understand them.
We will use two x-hours for optional review sessions before exams. And we'll use some other x-hours for lectures. So please keep your x-hours available for this course.
I like it when you ask questions in lecture. I really do. I understand that it can be intimidating to raise your hand for a question in a large lecture, but please do not hesitate to ask questions. Don't worry about what anyone thinks of you for asking questions. I'll think more of you if you understand the material, and if you need to ask questions, that's fine. And don't worry about what the other students might think. Chances are that if you have a question, then at least one other student—and possibly many more—has the same question. You're doing the other students a favor by asking!
If you bring a mobile phone, please make sure that it does not audibly ring during lecture.
I realize that you might find it useful to read the programs or lecture notes on your laptop during lecture. I'm OK with you doing so, subject to the policy in the next paragraph. But I am not OK with you using your laptop for email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. during lecture. If you are that bored during class, please leave the room so that your online activities do not distract those around you.
Having sat in on classes and having sat behind students, I have seen how much some students email, Facebook, etc. during classes. You make your own choices; I question this one, but it is yours to make.
It is not fair to distract others with your laptop, however, so please be respectful of those around you.
You are required to attend a one-hour recitation section meeting each week. Attendance is mandatory; section leaders will actually take attendance
Download this form, and follow the instructions. You must fill it out and email it to Professor Farid by 4:00 pm on Wednesday, March 27. The recitation section schedule will be determined by Thursday afternoon, and your section assignment will be on the Recitation Sections page by then. This page will be accessible only through the Blackboard site. You are responsible for checking this page and attending your recitation section starting on April 1 or 2.
If you say you are available during a one-hour slot, I expect you to honor this commitment. Please take this expectation into account as you make other commitments on and off campus this term.
We recognize that occasionally (which means "not on a regular basis"), you might not be able to attend the recitation section to which you have been assigned. In that event, please find another section to attend that week. Make sure that your regular section leader knows that you'll be attending another section, and make sure you get permission in advance from the section leader whose section you'll be visiting.
There will be two midterm exams, on April 18 and May 9, 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm. If a scheduling conflict prevents you from taking one or both of the midterm exams at the scheduled time, you must let me know by 5:00 pm on the preceding Monday (April 15 and May 6). No exceptions.
The final exam is scheduled by the Registrar and will be offered at one time, and one time only: Friday May 31 at 3:00 p.m.. The only way that you may take the final exam at another time is if you have a documented illness that prevented you from taking the exam at the scheduled time.
Before each exam, I will post a web page to help you review. There will also be review sessions during the x-hours the days of the first two exams. We will also hold a review session before the final exam, time and location to be determined.
The three exams count toward 45% of your final grade, but they will be weighted unevenly, to your advantage. The two that you do best on will count 17% each, and the one on which you do the worst will count only 11%.
There is no fixed scale for assigning letter grades. I expect the median grade for the course to be B+ or B, but I make no guarantees in advance. The median grades depend on you. If your grade is borderline, I may take your attendance at recitation sections into account when deciding which way to go.
Short assignments are relatively brief exercises that you will turn in at the next Monday, Wednesday, or Friday class. In some cases, you might have two classes to work on a short assignment. Short assignments will usually consist of one or two short programs to help you understand the concept being covered.
You will submit short assignments by email. They will have a timestamp, and so we will know when you submitted them. They are due at the start of class on the day they are due. The start of class is 1:45 pm sharp. If your short assignment comes in at 1:46 pm, it is late. Short assignments handed in late will receive no credit.
Your section leader will grade your short assignments on a scale of 0, 1, or 2.
In-depth lab assignments will be due on certain Mondays and Fridays through the course; you will have one week to work on each lab. You are not required to complete the lab assignment in the lab. You may use your own computer wherever you like, just as you do for short assignments.
Lab assignments require a significant time commitment. Start early, and if you need to, get advice from me, the section leaders, the TA, or at lab help hours.
Like short assignments, you will submit lab assignments by email. They are due at the start of class, 1:45 pm, on the day they are due. If your lab assignment comes in at 1:46 pm, it is late. Many of the lab assignments will also have "checkpoints," which are pieces of the lab assignment that we separate out as short assignments; the grading and lateness policy for checkpoints will be the same as for any other short assignment.
Each lab assignment is worth 40 points. If you hand in a lab assignment late but by 5:00 pm the day it's due, we will deduct 4 points (10%). If you hand it in between 5:00 pm the day it's due and 5:00 pm the next day, we will deduct 16 points (40%). We will not accept it after 5:00 pm the next day, and you will get 0.
There are two ways that you can get an exemption from this lateness policy. First, if something happens beyond your control that prevents you from doing your assignment on time, then we can excuse a late assignment. Second, you may be able to arrange in advance to submit your assignment late. You will need a Darned Good Reason to do so. Note that you need to ask in advance. The day the assignment is due does not count as "in advance." Only Professor Farid is authorized to excuse late assignments. Section leaders and the TA are not authorized to excuse late assignments.
Yes, this lateness policy is a bit harsh. Why? Because in the past, those who have fallen behind have had trouble catching up. So we are trying to prevent you from falling behind.
Some of the assignments may suggest extra credit work. Extra credit in this course will be tallied separately from regular scores. If you end up on a borderline between two grades at the end of the course (or are being considered for a citation), extra credit will count in your favor. Failure to do extra credit will never be counted against you, however. You should do extra credit work if you find it interesting and think that it might teach you something. It never pays to skimp on the regular assignments in order to do extra credit problems.
One corollary of the way in which we count extra credit is that if you get a 30 on a lab assignment and also 5 points of extra credit, that is not the same as getting a 35 with no extra credit. The latter is far better.
There are many ways for you to get help. You can visit me during office hours, you can go to 003 Sudikoff when course staff is there, or you can make an appointment with me, your section leader, or the TA. You should also feel free to ask for help by email. You can email a specific person, including me. For a faster response, you can get an answer from the first member of the course staff (again including me) to read your message by emailing to
This account is a mailing list consisting of me, the TA, and all section leaders. (Note that you have to put cs. after the @ in the address.) We will try to respond as soon as possible.
If you visit me or any of the course staff for help with a program that you are writing, make sure that you can get to an electronic copy of your program. That way, we can try to compile and run it.
The Tutor Clearinghouse is another source of help. They will have private, one-on-one tutors available for this class. The tutors are recruited on the basis that they have done well in the subject, and they are trained by the Academic Skills Center. If you are on financial aid, the College will pay for three hours a week of tutoring. To get a tutor, go to 301 Collis and fill out an application.
Several days per week, there will be course staff in Sudikoff 002 or 003 to lend a hand with assignments or anything else you would like help with.
003 has a number of iMacs that are available for your use. They run OS X version 10.7 (Lion). 002 has no computers, so make sure to bring your own laptop when you go to 002. If you go to 003, you may use your own laptop or one of the iMacs on site.
You might find it useful to do some of the assignments right in the lab. Many of the problems that will stump you and waste your time if you are working alone can be cleared up in moments by the course staff. Then again, you might not find it useful to work in the lab, depending on how many of your fellow students are competing with you for machines. Of course, you can bring your own laptop with you, and then you're competing only for seats.
Please prepare before going to lab; course staff can be much more helpful if you've already made a solid effort at solving the problem you are working on.
002 and 003 Sudikoff are locked at all times, but if you're registered for CS 1, you should be able to get in with your Dartmouth ID. The entrances to Sudikoff are locked after 6:00 pm, but if you're registered for CS 1, you should be able to get into the building with your Dartmouth ID. The second floor of Sudikoff also requires card access after 6:00 pm, and again, your Dartmouth ID should get you in, if you're registered for CS 1.
Note that there are several restrictions that come with access to Sudikoff. Among them are that you are not to lend your Dartmouth ID to anyone else in order to allow them into the building or labs. Also, you must not bring food into 003. You may eat at the tables in the hallway outside the lab. Food in the labs can make the keyboards darned unpleasant to use, and it can even render machines unusable.
The textbook is Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey. The textbook is free. You can find it at this site, where you can either view it on the web or download it as a PDF.
We will be using Eclipse Java EE IDE, Indigo Release. This software is a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that runs on both Windows and Mac OS X. You will install this software on your own computer as part of the first short assignment.
Unfortunately for Windows users (and, yes, we know that many Dartmouth students have opted for Windows), the Mac will be the "primary" machine supported. The CS undergraduate lab for this course contains only iMacs. I use a MacBook Pro. Some of the course staff have experience with Windows, however, so you may find it a good idea to ask them your Windows-specific questions. Because I don't run Windows, I will be unable to help you with Windows-specific problems. Indeed, one great asset of our course staff is that many of them can help you with Windows issues.
Note that you can always email your program to yourself. So even if you normally run Windows but you want to work on an iMac in the lab, you'll be able to work on your own code.
All documents, class examples, lab assignments, short assignments, and sample solutions related to the course will be on the web: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs1/.
On exams, all work must be your own. You may work on short assignments individually or in groups. Programs that you turn in, however, should be created, typed, documented, and output generated, yourself. For the lab assignments, you may consult freely with instructors and classmates during the phase of designing solutions, but you should then work individually when creating your programs—typing, documenting, and generating output. During the debugging stage you may discuss your problems with others in the class, but you should not copy code to "fix" bugs. To do otherwise is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle. If you work with a classmate on any assignment, you should tell us who you worked with in a comment at the beginning of your program.
You should attribute the proper source in any code that you submit that you did not write yourself. This includes code that you take from outside references—for example a book other than the course text. And it even includes code that you take from class examples, a book, or the assignments. (I agree that may be tedious to attribute the source in code that we have given you, but we want you to be in the habit of attributing your sources.)
If you resubmit a short assignment and use code from the published solution, you should attribute that. Note also that proper respect for copyright laws as it applies to printed and software products is part of the Computing Code of Ethics.
Whenever we ask you to turn in sample runs of your program, the runs you turn in must be the result of actually running your program. It is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle to falsely represent output as coming from your program if it did not. If you change your program, make sure to generate output from the version of the program that you hand in. It's amazing how a seemingly minor change to the code can cause a big change to the output of a program. Also, make sure that when you are running a program, that it is your program; it is easier than you might think on a public Mac to run a program that someone else had left on the machine.
In the past, we have had a few incidents in which students turned in output that did not come from the program handed in. In each case, it turned out that the student had made a foolish mistake (in not rerunning the program or handing in an old version of the program or the output) and had not intended to misrepresent the work. Yet it caused many an uncomfortable moment for the student and also for the student's section leader and for the professor as well. So please—pretty please with sugar on top—endeavor to verify that you're handing in output that comes from the very program you're handing in.
It is not easy to come up with good homework problems that help you learn a concept, are interesting, and require an appropriate amount of work. Over the years we have developed and refined a number of homework problems, and I plan to reuse some of them for this class. You should not look at any solutions to homeworks assigned in previous terms, including sample solutions, or solutions written by other students.
We have had some uncomfortable situations occur in the past, and I want to make it clear what the policy is. Two students, Alice and Ralph, discuss an assignment and design their code together. That is fine. But then they decide that since their programs would be so similar, they might as well have Alice type in the code, have Ralph make his own copy of the file containing the code, and then have Ralph make his own minor changes. This is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle. Although you may discuss and design with others, the code you hand in must be entirely your own.
Here's another situation that occurred. Trixie and Ed start working independently on a program. Trixie finishes and has a working version. Ed has trouble with his. Trixie helps Ed debug. That is fine. But then Trixie realizes that Ed has a section of code that is all wrong and the program she wrote has just the right code for that section. She shows Ed her program. Or worse, she gives Ed an electronic copy of her program so that he can just paste in the correct code. Either action is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle.
I realize that it can be hard to decide when you might be violating the Academic Honor Principle when we let you collaborate to a limited extent. Here is a good rule of thumb. If you are talking in normal English (or Chinese or German or some other natural language) you are probably OK. If you find yourself talking in Python code, you have crossed the line. So saying, "Your program runs forever because you have the wrong condition in the while loop" is OK. But saying, "Change while x == 0: to while x >= 0:" is not.
If you have any question about whether what you're doing is within the Academic Honor Principle, do not hesitate to check with me. If it's late and you can't find me, you're better off erring on the side of caution.
Most violations of the Academic Honor Principle come down to failure to cite work that is not yours. If you copy any portion of your program from your friend Elvira and represent it as your work, then you either intended to deceive or were careless about citing. Either case is a violation of the Academic Honor Principle. If you copy your entire program from Elvira but include the comment, "This code was copied in its entirety from Elvira," then you cited properly, though you didn't actually do the work. In this latter case, I would not report a violation of the Academic Honor Principle, though your grade on the assignment would be 0. But that would be far preferable to a COS hearing.
The same goes for code that you find in some other book or on the Internet. You are in violation of the Academic Honor Principle if you fail to attribute your sources.
You don't need to cite if you wrote the code yourself. You don't need to cite just because you're using a construct you saw elsewhere. For example, you need not cite for using print "something", even though it was in the class examples. That would be like citing "printing press" in an essay! Nor do you have to cite just because you use a while-loop, even though you saw a while-loop in a class example. It's when you lift several lines of code from elsewhere that you need to cite.
To cite, include in a comment—near the top of your file is fine—stating where you got the code from:
# Based on the say_introduction function in the January 7 lecture.Please do not cheat. Cheaters—whether or not they are caught—bring dishonor upon themselves and upon everyone else at Dartmouth. To do that, for just a few lousy points in a course, is [insert your favorite strong adjective meaning "stupid" here]. Furthermore, if you cannot solve the short assignments and lab assignments on your own, then you will be nailed on the exams.
I have served on the COS, and I have seen what happens to students who are caught cheating: they are sent on the "Parkhurst FSP." (This year, I suppose it would be the "Baker FSP.") I have brought several Academic Honor Principle cases to the COS, and I deeply dislike having to do so. Please don't make me.
If you are working on a computer that is not yours—especially a Mac in 003 Sudikoff—or that someone else in the course might use, you should be very careful to remove your code from the computer when you are all done. You should probably email your code to yourself before you remove the code. Why do we tell you to do this? Because if you leave your code on a computer, and someone else can see it, then they can copy it and hand it in. If that happens, then we have a bad situation involving you (the copy-ee) and the other person (the copy-er), and it's difficult—if not impossible—to tell who was the copy-ee and who was the copy-er. By removing your code from the computer when you're done, you can avoid getting yourself into that situation.
To remove your code, you'll want to delete it from the Eclipse workspace. And you'll also want to move any other copies on the computer to the Trash (or the Recycling Bin) and empty it.
Some students may wish to take part in religious observances that occur during this academic term. If you have a religious observance that conflicts with your participation in the course, please meet with me before the end of the second week of the term to discuss appropriate accommodations.
I encourage students with disabilities, including "invisible" disabilities such as chronic diseases and learning disabilities, to discuss with me after class or during my office hours appropriate accommodations that might be helpful to you.
Students with disabilities enrolled in this course and who may need disability-related classroom accommodations are encouraged to make an appointment to see me before the end of the second week of the term. All discussions will remain confidential, although the Student Accessibility Services office may be consulted to discuss appropriate implementation of any accommodation requested.
This course was designed with the help of many students, including Sucharita Jayanti, Siddhartha Jayanti, Zachary Marois, Aaron Watanabe, Peter Johnson, and Weifu Wang. Many of the web pages and lectures are based on web pages written by Professor Devin Balkcom.
Read the material I ask you to read, and follow the instructions. Many students have wasted a lot of their valuable time, and their grades have suffered, simply because they did not follow directions. Start all assignments early. With few exceptions, at the time you receive an assignment, you'll know everything you need to do it. There is no reason to procrastinate.
At the same time, do not be afraid to get help. The purpose of this course is not to waste your time. If you are spinning and not making progress on a problem, please see me, the TA, or a section leader. We can point you in the right direction without giving away the store.
The material in CS 1 builds on itself, and the pace is fast. As a result, it's easy to fall behind in this course, and if you do it's very difficult to recover.