Syllabus

Table of contents

1. Overview
   1. General Information
   2. Course Description
2. Course Schedule
   1. Lecture
   2. Labs
   3. Office Hours
3. Policies
   1. Evaluation
   2. Grade Weighting
   3. Assignments
   4. Late Days
   5. Dropped assignments
   6. Exams
   7. Cheating
4. Resources
5. ADA Compliance Statement

Overview

General Information

• Semester and year: Fall 2022
• Course number: CSCI 110
• Course id: CSCI110F2F01/CSCI110F2F02/CSCI110F2F03 (depending on your section)
• No. credit hours: 3.0
• Co-requisite: CSCI 110L (Lab)
• Instructor: Jake Shoudy
• Instructor email: jshoudy@fisk.edu
• Lecture location: LIBR-317
• Lecture time:
  • CSCI110F2F02: MWF 8-8:55am
  • CSCI110F2F01: MWF 11-11:55am
  • CSCI110F2F03: MWF 3-3:55pm
• Instructor office: TBD (somewhere on 3rd floor of LIBR)
• Instructor office hours:
  • MWF 2-3pm
  • Th 11am-12:30pm
• Textbook: There is no textbook for this course

Course Description

CSCI 110 is an introductory class designed for students with no formal exposure to computer science or programming. The goal is to provide a gentle but thorough introduction to computer science that will prepare students to either take further computer science courses, or use computer science in their field of study.

By the end of the course, students will learn

• Variables, Expressions, Types
• Input/Output
• Logic and Control Flow
• Functions
• Testing and Debugging
• Basic Algorithms
• Runtime and efficiency
• Objects and Classes
• Sets and Dictionaries

Course Schedule

Lectures, labs, and office hours are the main ways in which you will interact with your professor and TAs. You can see the weekly schedule of course meetings on the course calendar page. Lectures and labs will be held in Library 317. Instructor office hours will be held on the Library 3rd floor at this time until an office has been assigned.

Lecture

Lecture will be held in Library 317 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Lecture will be focused on introducing new concepts with some time to practice built in. Attendance will be recorded. There are three sections and each student must attend one of them:

• MWF 8-8:55am
• MWF 11-11:55am
• MWF 3-3:55pm

Labs

Labs will be held in Library 317 on Tuesdays. Labs will provide an environment for students to practice the concepts taught in lecture. It will also be a time for students to work on homeworks and projects with readily available help. Attendance will be recorded. There are three sections for labs and each student must attend one of them:

• T 8-9:50am
• T 12:30-2:20pm
• T 3-4:50pm

You should take advantage of labs as you can ask the professor or TAs for help on completing the assignments.

Office Hours

We will hold in-person office hours at a wide variety of times. In-person office hours with Prof. Shoudy will be held on the Library 3rd floor on MWF from 2-3pm and on Thursdays from 11am-12:30pm. Additionally please stop by Prof. Shoudy’s office (location TBD) at any time outside of these hours and if he is there he will be happy to help you. You are welcome to come to office hours for any reason, including course material questions, lecture clarifications, industry interview prep, career path discussions, or just to hang out.

Additionally TAs will hold there own office hours. TAs are upperclassmen that have taken this class in the past. The schedule for all office hours can be found at the course calendar page.

As a course, we commit to making sure no student fails the class due to lack of class resources, so if you are behind or confused, please reach out for help. The course staff will make themselves as available as possible to help you.

Policies

Evaluation

Your final grade will be calculated based on your exams, homeworks, projects, and quizzes. See the section below for a detailed breakdown. Depending on the difficulty of the material, a curve may be applied to increase grades at the end of the semester. A curve will never be used to decrease grades. Final grades will be assigned according to:

Grade Weighting

There will be two grading systems, both very similar, which will be applied to your work throughout the course. Your final grade will be the greater of the two scores. The intention here is to provide a slight benefit to those students who performed really well on projects but may have had slightly lower exam scores or vice versa. The two weighting systems are:

Assignments

These details are subject to change during the semester, however the current plan of record is the following:

• Homeworks - ~weekly assignments due each Wednesday. Work individually, submit individually. Late days are allowed (see below).
• 2 Projects - Blackjack and TBD. These will be multi-week assignments with weekly submissions to keep students on track. Late days are not allowed.
• Weekly Quizzes - short quiz every Friday that is not an exam week (also excluding the first week). These are low consequence (5% of grade) checks meant to act as a signal for both the instructor and students for how student understanding matches course content.

Late Days

Each homework will be due at 11:59pm on Wednesdays. However, students may still turn in any homework after the due date with a 10% penalty for each day that the assignment is late up to 3 days maximum. Everyone gets 2 free late days that do not count against them.

Late days can be used on homeworks only, not on projects or any other asssignment.

Dropped assignments

The lowest 2 scores for homeworks and quizzes will be dropped, meaning they will not count towards your final grade.

Exams

Instead of one midterm and one final exam, this course will have 3 exams, spaced roughly evenly across the semester, with the third exam happening during finals week.

• Exam 1 will be on Wednesday, September 14th.
• Exam 2 will be on Wednesday, October 26th.
• Exam 3 will take place during finals week.

Each exam will be worth an increased percentage of the final grade to reward students that make progress throughout the semester.

Cheating

For all assignments in the course, you may discuss approaches to solving a problem or work in the same room on separate computers to individually solve a problem, but you may not copy and paste code or substantially copy ideas from another student. Additionally the internet is a great source for getting help when you’re stuck but you may not copy and paste code directly from the internet. It can be tempting to cheat. Know that all code submitted to Ed will be run through a very good plagiarism detector that compares each students submissions to each other.

Cheating is not tolerated. If you are caught cheating:

• 1st time: automatic 0 for copier and copied (if applicable)
• 2nd time: automatic failure in the course

For exams & quizzes cheating activities include but are not limited to conferring with one another during a test by text messaging, talking, hand signals, roaming eyes, and other signals. Do not allow others to look at your answers. Additionally running the code from a code analysis question (either within Ed or in an outside IDE like Replit or PyCharm) is cheating.

For projects and homeworks cheating will be determined by the automatic plagiarism detector and manually reviewed by the instructor. If I ask you how your code works and you do not know, it will be evident that you have copied it.

Don’t take the risk. Despite this explicit warning, each year, a few students still cheat and are caught. I do not enjoy catching and penalizing students for plagiarism, but it’s necessary for maintaining a fair classroom. The course staff will work tirelessly to provide enough support for any student to get help and make it through the class. In exchange, we ask you to uphold academic integrity and not to plagiarize code or ideas. If you are struggling because there’s not enough time or the concepts are difficult, email the professor. Extensions are available if you let me know what’s going on.

Resources

This course website, csci110.org, will be your one-stop resource for the syllabus, schedule, slides, and assignment links. Additionally, we will be using the following software.

• Ed You will get a link to sign up for this tool when we begin class. We will use Ed for editing code, turning in assignments, taking quizzes & tests, and as our main tool for communication/class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TAs, and the instructor. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Ed. You can sign up for the Ed by clicking this link and using your @fisk.edu email to sign up. Note that any “grade” you see in Ed is not official.

• Replit Replit is a tool for writing and running code quickly. It can be used for more sophisticated things as well but for this class we will use it just as a playground for experimenting with code.

• Canvas Your official grades will be published in Canvas. You should already have a Canvas account. Get in touch with your advisor if you can’t access the course on Canvas. Other than occasionally syncing grades to Canvas, we will not be using it.

ADA Compliance Statement

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require that “no qualified person shall, solely by reason of disability, be denied access to, be excluded from participation in, or the benefits of services, programs or activities or subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal assistance.” Students with disabilities who qualify for academic accommodations must provide notification from Counseling Services and discuss specific needs with the instructor, preferably during the first two weeks of class. Contact Counseling Services at 329-8776 to assist in arranging appropriate accommodations if you have a disability.