CS1711 - Fall 2004

Instructors:

Prof. L. Keliher, Dunn 223, Office hours: 10-noon Tuesday, 11:30-noon Wednesday
Prof. R. Rosebrugh, Dunn 203, Office hours: 1:30-2:30 Thursday and Friday

General Information

The course meets MWF at 9:30 in Dunn 108 (Sect. A) and 10:30 in Avard Dixon 118 (Sect. B); the text is Objects first with JAVA (Second Edition) by Barnes and Kolling. At the rate of about one chapter per week, we will cover approximately Chapters 1 to 6 (before the Midterm Test), and 8 to 12. There will be assigned three hour labs held in the PC Lab in Dunn 102. Labs start the week of September 13. There will be two programming assignments. One in-class Mid-term Test will be held on October 22. The Lab Test will be held during labs on Nov. 15 and 17

Slides from Sept. 8, 2004 class.

For official detail see the Department Handbook.

For practice, last year's midterm test in PDF format is here.

Grades

Note: In order to pass the course: The final grade in the course will normally be assigned with approximately the following weighting:

Laboratories

Laboratory attendance is mandatory. As noted above, you must complete 8 of the 9 labs to pass the course (unless excused). Please contact Robert Allen rallen@mta.ca concerning lab absences.

Use ETA to download and submit files for labs (and assignments).

The Lab Test will be held during labs on Nov. 15 and 17. All laboratory solutions must conform to the CS1711 JAVA Programming Standards. Items which violate standards will be marked down at least one grade.

The JavaDoc advance information for the LabTest is at mathcs.mta.ca/courses/comp1711/LabTestDoc.zip

Assignments

The assignments will be due on October 15 and November 19. All assignment solutions must conform to the CS1711 JAVA Programming Style Guide. Programs which violate standards will be marked down at least one grade.

The PDF file for Assignment 1 is here ; also available from ETA.

Programming Standards

All laboratory and assignment solutions must conform to the CS1711 JAVA Programming Style Guide. These are be based on the BlueJ standards http://www.bluej.org/objects-first/styleguideplain.html . For a more detailed standard see: 171104_adv_programming_standards.html

Some Class Examples

Text Game input
Summing an array
Selection Sort of Items

Course Ethics

You are expected to be familiar with and you must follow the Computing Services Department Policies . Note especially items 4, 5 and 10.

By its nature much of the work in Computer Science is done in collaborations. Indeed, in later courses in the subject you will often be assigned to work on projects in small groups. Thus, it is important that students in CS1711 have a clear idea of what is appropriate collaboration and what is cheating.

With the exception of assigned collaboration in some labs, all CS 1711 course work must be done individually. You are encouraged to discuss any CS1711 topic, including programming and lab assignments, with other students in the course but exchange of any JAVA code by any written or electronic means between CS1711 students is not acceptable. It is dishonest either to read someone else's solution or to provide a classmate with a copy of your work.

Penalties for cheating are severe and may result in a failing grade for the course. See Calendar Regulation 6.13.

Do not expect that small changes in a program (such as altering comments, changing class or variable names, or interchanging statements) will avoid detection. If you cannot do the work yourself, it is extremely unlikely that you will succeed in disguising someone else's work.

Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. Even the most trivial assignment is better not done than if you cheat to complete it.

Useful Links

A recent article in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery about Computer Science as a discipline is
here, also in PDF .
Another article on the same topic is here.
The BlueJ site:
http://www.bluej.org
where you can also find the
BlueJ Tutorial
From Sun's Java site:
http://java.sun.com/
see especially the API documents at
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/
an excellent Java tutorial at
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/TOC.html
and a great Swing tutorial at
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing

Last updated: December 7, 2004.