Introduction to Computer Science - Course Information

COMP 112: 2018 Trimester 1

This document gives additional information about the course that is not included in the Course Outline.

Course Organisation details

Lectures

A schedule of lecture topics, readings, and assignment due dates is available online. Copies of the lecture slides will be available via the schedule page.

Laboratories

Each student should attend one hour of labs, in the booked times Mon @ 12-1 or Mon @ 2-3. You must sign up for the lab sessions on the web: (at https://student-sa.victoria.ac.nz/) (also linked from the course home page).

To work on your assignments beyond the scheduled lab times, you may use any of the ECS computing labs on the second floor of Cotton at any time, unless they are booked for another class. You may also use your own computer.

Textbook and other Materials

There is no assigned textbook for COMP 112, but some students may find the COMP102 textbook useful: Java Foundations: Introduction to Program Design and Data Structures, by Lewis, DePasquale, and Chase, 4th Edition, published by Pearson (2016: ISBN 10: 0134285433 ISBN 13: 978-0134285436). Note that the assigned textbook is also the current textbook for COMP103.

Students are not required to have their own computers, but resources are provided to make it easy for students work on the programming assignments on their own computers.

Staff

Communication

The main means of communication outside of lecture will be the COMP 112 web area at http://ecs.wgtn.ac.nz/Courses/COMP112_2018T1.

The forum is a web-based bulletin board system. Questions, comments, and responses can be posted to the forum. Staff will read the forum posts and may respond to them.You should make a bookmark to the course home page because you will need to access it frequently.

Assignments and Practical Work.

There will be 10 assignments, and you have the option to do a bigger assignment named 6and7 instead of assignment 6 and assignment 7, similarly you can do 8and9 instead of assignment 8 and assignment 9. The course web site has a page listing the assignments, due dates, and resources. The lab assignments will be available from the website.

The assignments consist primarily of programming tasks to ensure that you have all the basics of programming in Java. Each assignment will require you to write one or more programs for a variety of applications. The two alternative assignments 6and7 and 8and9 are slightly larger programming projects in which you will build applications in the areas of graphics, and networking. The assignments may involve some non-programming components also. The assignments address most of the concepts and techniques that are introduced in the lectures, and they are the most important way of coming to grips with the material in the course. Due dates and how to submit your answers to the assignments are addressed below.

The assignments are intended to take 5-6 hours per week, but the actual time required will vary considerably from student to student. The scheduled lab session will help you start the assignments, but you will definitely need to spend more time outside the scheduled sessions. There will be scheduled help-desk times when a tutor is available to answer individual questions about the assignments, and we will also provide on-line helpdesk assistance.

The assignments will all be structured into
  • a Core part, which represents the minimum that we expect everyone to complete, and will cover the essential concepts and constructs. It is worth up to 65% (which is the top of the C+ grade range)
  • a Completion part, which extends the Core part and involves more difficult thinking and may cover additional concepts and constructs. We would like to see all students at least attempt the completion. Together with the core, it is worth up to 80%, which is the top of the B+ grade range.
  • a Challenge part, which usually involves more difficult programming and problem solving and allows the strongest students to demonstrate excellence. This part is required to get a mark in the A range. We do not expect all students to be able to do the challenge within a reasonable time. Do not spend so much time on your assignments that you neglect other parts of the course, or your other courses - they are important also!

Assignment Submission

Each assignment has a due date and time, usually at 10am on a Thursday. You have one week for each of the assignments and two weeks for the two alternative assignments.

When you have completed them, the assignments should be submitted via the online submission system.This means that you can submit assignments from the ECS labs or from a computer at home (or anywhere on the internet). You may resubmit as many times as you wish, but the most recent submission of a file will always overwrite previous submissions (You'll learn about how to submit assignments using a web browser in Assignment 1).

Assignment Marking

All the assignments are important for your learning. They will all be marked, and will together contribute a total of 20% to your final grade.

We will attempt to mark the assignments within one week of submission. Your marks and comments on your submission will be accessible via the web: see the links on the Assignments page.

The mandatory course requirement is that that you attain a D in at least 8 of the lab assignments.

Model solutions to the assignments will be made available at the end of the lecture following the submission time. These will allow you to review and assess your own work, and also build on the model solutions for the next assignment. Comparing your work to the provided solutions is an important part of the learning. Note that this means that assignments submitted after the solutions are made available will generally not be marked, unless you have made arrangements on the basis of exceptional circumstances with the lecturer or senior tutor.

Getting Help: help desk and online help.

To help you when you are having difficulties with the assignments, we have tutors able to respond to queries via an on-line helpdesk. The online tutor will be responding to queries throughout the week, but we cannot guarantee an immediate reply. There will be a physical helpdesk available in CO 242b at certain times throughout the week; the times will be announced and posted on the course web site once they are determined..

We strongly advise you NOT to leave the assignments to the last minute, since there may not be any help available near the submission deadline.

Grade Computation

Your grade for COMP 112 will be determined based on the following assessment weightings:
Item Weight
Assignments 20%
Test 1 15%
Test 2 15%
Final Examination 50%

If you get a higher mark in the exam than you did in a test, then we will boost your test mark up to your exam mark - we do not want to penalise students who took longer to get on top of the material, but got there in the end, as demonstrated in their exam.

Bachelor of Engineering students should be aware that copies of their assessed work may be retained for inspection by accreditation panel.

Passing COMP 112

To pass COMP 112, a student must satisfy the mandatory requirements and gain at least a C- grade overall.

Course Specific Information about Plagiarism.

We encourage you to talk with each other about the course and the assignments, and to help each other when you are stuck. But work that you submit for your assignments should represent your own work; presenting other people's work as your own is plagiarism and is not acceptable to the university. Please read the university and school policies on academic integrity and plagiarism below to make sure you know what is and what isn't allowed. A key point to remember is that if you are using other people's work as part of your assignment, you must make clear which bits are not yours, and then you can't be accused of plagiarism.

Please read the School policy on Plagiarism. We will penalise anyone we find plagiarising, whether from students currently doing the course, or from other sources. Students who knowingly allow other students to copy their work may also be penalised. If you have had help from someone else (other than a tutor), it is always safe to state the help that you got. For example, if you had help from someone else in writing a component of your code, it is not plagiarism as long as you state (eg, as a comment in the code) who helped you in writing the method.

In COMP 112, we may use an automated system to check all submitted code in order to identify students submitting the same code. The system does not make any code available to people other than the organiser of the course and the managers of the system.

Copyright: Although students own the copyright of any code that they write for an assignment, the COMP 112 assignments all build on some code that we have provided. This code is copyright by the university. We give you permission to use this code for your assignments, but you are not permitted to post to the web, or distribute in any other way, your answers if they include any of our code. Also, you may not distribute model solutions to anyone other than a student currently in the course. Breaking this rule is a violation of the university's statute on student conduct. If we find that you have distributed our code on the web or by other means, we will seek disciplinary penalties. Don't ruin the course for future students by giving them answers!