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Course Logistics / Policies

This course will consist of approximately 8 weeks of lecture videos assuming. At UW, this course meets for 3 lecture hours per week for 10 weeks but that often includes holidays and in-class exams. In addition, live classroom lectures are often longer due to in-class questions and their answers. We will have approximately the same material here, but it will be packaged into 11 sections, and there may be 1-3 sections released per week.

Overview of Course Materials

Here is a concise list of the course materials and activities. Each is described in more detail below:

• Video Lectures: these present the course material
• Recommended texts: provide another perspective on the lecture material and can serve as references for the work we will ask you to do
• Discussion Forum: for getting and giving help, discussing the course, etc.
• Assignments: There will be 6 programming assignments, each of the last 5 will be worth approximately 20% of your course grade; there will also be some written assignments that will not be graded

Lectures and Reading Notes

The videos will be divided into sections. There may be multiple sections per week. While each week has a fairly large number of videos, the videos are generally short so the total amount of time for the videos in a week is 2-4 hours. A few videos will be labeled optional.

Discussion Forum

Please use the discussion forum as a great resource. Helpfully respond to posts. Be sure to post in the most appropriate forum for your question or comment. Vote up important questions so that they come to the attention of the course staff. Before an assignment is due, do not post solutions or near-solutions to homework assignments as that can ruin the intellectual challenge for others.

Assignments

There will be two types of assignments: written and programming assignments. Written assignments will consist of problems that we feel highlight the principal concepts and analyses we want you to take away from the course. These written assignments will NOT be graded. Programming assignments will put your understanding to work on fairly complex programming or debugging tasks. There will be 6 programming assignments and these WILL be graded automatically. You will have the opportunity to submit your solutions three (3) times and we will take the maximum score of the 3. Late assignments will be accepted at a 50% penalty to your grade but only for a limited number of days after the due date. After the hard deadline no credit will be given for any submission. These programming assignments will constitute your entire grade and they are roughly equal in value except for the very first assignment (lab0) that is purely for the purpose of getting your programming environment up and running. Each programming assignment will involve either writing code or debugging code or both. We will provide you with test cases to run on your own machine prior to submitting your work, but we reserve the right to grade your submission based on different test cases than we give you. Thoroughly debug your code before submitting!

Cheating Policy

The work you submit should be your very own work. You should never submit code you copied from someone else even if you then made edits to it. Do not look for solutions online -- either outside Coursera or within the discussion forums. Write your programs starting from the code provided to you from the assignment. You may copy-and-edit any code you find in the course materials (lectures, reading notes, etc.), but not posted from other students on the discussion forum. You may discuss the general conceptual aspects of the assignment with others and get help from them if you are stuck.

Challenges and Extra Credit

Some of the programming assignments may include more challenging elements that will be for extra credit. These are essentially optional. They are designed to have little (but some) impact on your grade whether you do them or not. Challenge problems provide an opportunity to work on something a bit more difficult and interesting. They will typically allow you to up to around 10% of additional credit on an assignment, yet they will usually be much more difficult than this credit amount suggests. You should not attempt a challenge problem until you have finished the rest of an assignment. Challenge problems may be less carefully specified and less carefully calibrated for how difficult or time-consuming they are.

Exams

There will be no exams for this course.

What are we going to learn?

See the information on the Syllabus page.