General

Office hours:

Here is a calendar of all the office hours that the course staff offer. If you would like to speak to an instructor and you cannot make it to their office hours, send an email to set up a meeting. If you have a general question and cannot make it to anyone’s office hours, post to Piazza (see below).

For the most part, office hours are in 102 WVH or 108 WVH, and staff members will have the same office hours every week. Before going to someone’s hours, check where they will be on the calendar below. Should there be a change to someone’s hours, there will be a post on Piazza and the calendar will be updated.

People

Instructors:

TAs:

Your TAs and tutors help run the labs, help grade the exams, and hold office hours. In general, they are apprentice teachers and are here to learn how to run a course. At the same time, though, they are your peers who have taken the course, and can see your problems from your perspective.

Tutors:

Your tutors help run the labs, grade the homework sets, and hold office hours. In general, they are people who are interested in helping others learn, and they are your peers who have taken the course, and can see your problems from your perspective.

Communications

If you need help, you may talk to any of the instructors, the TAs or tutors during their office hours.

Use NEU email (@husky.neu.edu) to reach any of the course staff; usernames are given above. Use @ccs.neu.edu to reach instructors.

Piazza is an on-line forum for class discussions. Anybody can post a question and anybody else can reply.

Before posting, check whether or not your question has already been asked. If it already has been asked and has not yet been answered, provided the question is not more than a day old, it likely will be answered soon. Do not double post.

Posting any parts of a solution to any parts of a homework assignment is considered cheating. You don’t want to do this. Limit your answers to other students to providing clarity when needed and hints when appropriate. This is good practice should you ever want to be a tutor :)

Note: anonymity on Piazza is implemented to make you anonymous to students but not to staff members.

General Policies

• Late assignment policy: Late assignments will be accepted up to two days late, with a 50% penalty per day. An assignment that is one minute late is automatically counted as a full day late. Speak to the professors in advance of a deadline if you cannot complete an assignment on time.

• Laptop policy: No laptops in class.

• Academic honesty: We will strictly enforce Northeastern’s academic integrity policy. You may discuss problems with other students, but you may not share or show code to anyone other than your assigned partner or the course staff. Violations of academic integrity will be reported to OSCCR and will have a negative impact on your grade.

Lectures

Accelerated Section: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday at 1:35pm–2:40pm
        IV 019        Lerner

Lectures policy:

You are required to read the lecture material for the given lecture before coming to class. During the lectures we will discuss the material covered in the required reading, answer questions, provide additional examples and applications.

It is OK if you do not understand everything when you first read it, but reading about the new concept ahead of the time will give you a chance to anticipate the questions you may have and allow you to follow better the details of explanation during the lectures.

Labs

• Mondays at 6-7:40pm in WVH 108
       TA: Christian Munoz-Robayo

• Mondays at 6-7:40pm in DG 119
       TA: DJ Richardson

Labs policy

The goal of the labs is to see in practice problems that illustrate the concepts covered in the lectures, and to prepare you for the next programming assignment.

There is a lot of technical detail related to running Java programs that will be covered in the early labs. Later labs will focus more on design questions and on good Java programming practice.

In-lab Quizzes and Code review

We will be running quizzes during several of the labs, possibly without prior warning. The goal of the quizzes is to see that you are familiar with the most basic concepts covered during the recent lectures, labs, and assignments.

Quizzes will be graded, and are counted as part of your exam scores (see Exams below). The intent is to assess your progress in the course in smaller chunks rather than just through lengthy midterm exams.

If you do not pass the quiz, you need to meet with the instructor within the next week, to identify the problems you may have and to help you get back on track.

We will also be conducting code reviews in labs, of either the material from that lab or from the prior week’s homework. As presenters, be prepared to explain your design choices to your classmates. As reviewers, pay attention both to how the presenters organize their explanations and how they organize their code, and feel free to ask clarifying questions about either.

Computing Environment

You will complete your assignments (other than the first one) using the Eclipse IDE. Though, if you feel more comfortable, you may choose to use another IDE (e.g. NetBeans) or work directly from the command line, but you and your partner must both be comfortable with the chosen programming environment, and the staff may not be able to assist you with issues encountered in other environments.

You will use the handin server to submit your homework. You may submit as many times as you wish, though submitting too frequently will be detected and rate-limited, to ensure fairness for other students. Be aware that close to the deadline when everyone submits all at once, the server will become less responsive.

Assignments

There will be one problem set each week, with individual problems due twice a week. (I.e., the problem set will be available all at once, then problem 1 would be due Monday while problems 2 and 3 would be due Thursday.)

As with last semester, the problem sets will include finger exercises and practice problems, that you are strongly encouraged to look at and confirm that you can solve. You are welcome to bring solutions to these problems to the course staff during the semester for informal feedback on how you’re doing.

The graded problems are to be solved collaboratively with your partner. The problems will consist of structured programming assignments that may be based on the work done in previous weeks, and may also include more creative projects where you can practice your design skills.

Due Dates: Mondays and Thursdays at 9:00pm, unless otherwise specified. As specified above, there is a 50% penalty per day for late homework.

Note: unlike last semester, you will submit each problem separately on the handin server. This is for your benefit: the server will attempt to compile and run your program against automated test cases. Having separate submissions for each problem means that a syntax error in one problem won’t immediately prevent your other problems from compiler also. Be careful to submit the correct answers to the correct problems.

Pair Programming

You must work on problem sets in pairs. We will assign you a partner. You will switch partners a few times during the semester.

Important Pair programming means that you and your partner work on the problem sets jointly. You read them together and you work on the solutions together. One of the lab’s purposes is to teach you how to work in pairs effectively; indeed, pairs are provably more effective than individuals in programming. The rough idea is this: One of you plays pilot, the other co-pilot. The pilot works on the keyboard and explains aloud what is going on; it is the co-pilot’s responsibility to question everything. After a problem is solved to the satisfaction of both, you must switch roles.

Every partner must be able to solve every homework problem in the end. In other words, you must be able to solve every homework problem on your own.

If you are having difficulties working with your partner, please inform your lab TA or your instructor quickly: we cannot help if we don’t know there’s a problem.

Academic Integrity

All programs must be completed strictly by you and your partner. You are free to discuss the problem sets with others, so long as you acknowledge (in comments, in your submitted files) whoever you discussed the problem with. However, you may not share code in any way. Submitting code that is not your own will be considered a violation of the University’s Academic Integrity Policy (page 40 of the 2016-2017 Underaduate Student Handbook). Violations of academic integrity will be reported to OSCCR, and will have strong consequences on your grade, from an automatic zero on the assignment to failing the course.

NOTE: Be aware that while submitting someone else’s code is clearly a violation, so is sharing your code with others, even if you truly just mean to help. Outside an academic environment, sharing code with unauthorized parties can be a criminal offense and have severe and unanticipated consequences.

If you are ever unsure of whether sharing is unacceptable or not, ask one of the course staff.

Exams

You may bring one sheet of notes to exams (may be typed or hand-written, one-sided or double-sided).

• Midterm 1: Thursday, February 15, 6-9pm. Rooms to be determined

• Midterm 2: Thursday, March 29, 6-9pm. Rooms to be determined

Grades

There will likely be some small amount of extra credit available on the last two assignments. Details to be determined.

As before, you can use the handin server to see the current weights of each assignment, and your approximate grade in the course so far. The exact weights of assignments, quizzes and exams will change during the semester, depending on exactly how many of each we have. We will let you know when we update these weights, and will try to keep it as infrequent as possible.