Held Wednesday, May 9, 2001
Summary
Today we spend the class on a number of fun and interesting administrative
issues.
- Ms. McClelland wants to ask you about how much work you do on your
classes.
- I've come up with preliminary grades for the in-class version of exam 3.
These may change after I grade the take-home version.
- The biggest problem on the in-class exam: assuming that
if
needs both clauses. It only needs one. It just returns "nothing" if
the test fails to hold.
- Another common problem. In writing the 6Ps, use Produces to
name the result and use Postconditions to formally define
its value.
- Tomorrow at 4:30, Eric Nana Otoo is speaking about his experience
programming PDAs.
- Tomorrow night from 8:00-9:30 in the IIF, my Web Software Engineering
students will be showing off some of their work. Come and get free
cookies and five points of extra credit, too.
Overview
- I've updated the overall grading Scheme to better reflect the parts of
the course. As I indicated early on, my grading schemes are always
subject to change.
- Exams are 45% of your gradee
- The best four of five graded homeworks/writeups are 30% of your
grade.
- The project is 15% of your grade.
- Participation is 10% of your grade.
- I've come up with draft
class participation
grades. Here's
my grading rubric. Let me know if you think I've failed to put
you in the correct category. ("attended most classes" = "missed no
more than five")
- 95-100: Attended most classes, volunteered suggestions, ideas and questions
- 90: Attended most classes, answered when called upon
- 85: Attended many but not most classes, volunteered suggestions, ideas,
and questions when present
- 80: Attended many but not most classes, answered when called upon
- I'm returning all the graded stuff I have so far.
- Yes, there does seem to be some stuff that the grader seems to have
missed. Let me know if you turned something in and it doesn't
show up on your blackboard grade sheet.
- Also check to makee sure that it appears as submitted in your
blackboard drop box.
- Are there questions on exam 3?
- I'll spend a little time on the binary search issue.
- It seems appropriate to start the end of the course by looking
at what I hope you've learneed from the course.
- Such reflection can tie together your experiencee.
- The institutional evaluation forms ask a number of questions about the
subject matter of the course
.
- I find it fun to talk about this subject.
- I believe that this course covers a number of different subject matters:
- At one level, this is a course about problem solving
- How to describe problems and solutions carefully
- Some general techniques for expressing solutions
- Ways to decide if a solution is correct
- The six P's
- Generalization
- At a related level, this a course about computer science and
computer programming.
- Recursion
- Core algorithms and data structures
- Objects
- General skills
- It is also a course about functional programming.
- Procedures as data
- Symbolic data
- Organizing data in lists and vectors
- More practically, this is a course about programming in
Scheme
- At a higher level, the course is also intended to develop
general thinking and learning skills
- Group work
- The need for formal and careful solutions
- The inability to deal with partially-correct solutions
- How to look for new information and ideas
- We've covered an amazing amount, and I congratulate you for your hard
work.
- Finally, in a bow to my mother, I claim that I've also tried
to do some moral modeling in this class.
- Treating you as people
- Showing the importance of family
- Demonstrating the joy of learning
Friday, 12 January 2001
- Created generic outline format for class.