CS 105 Update Log

If you’re here looking for the current CS 105 website, it’s moved!

The course website is now located at http://www.cs.iit.edu/~lee/cs105

All grades have been posted. Do e-mail me directly if you have any questions about your grade breakdown. You were a fantastic class — I hope you enjoyed taking the course as much as I did teaching it (and coming up with labs). Good luck with everything, and have a great break!

Mirrored here from http://www.hasbro.com/. And here’s the scoresheet I handed out in class.

For students curious about (some of) the solutions to the midterm exam problems, you can download midterm.rb and run it to see for yourself.

All midterm exam grades have been posted to blackboard, and I’ve also computed and uploaded midterm grades to Banner. You should be able to view them via the my.iit.edu portal. Because we don’t have final exam scores, the weights I used for computing the midterm grade are as follows:

• Labs – 50%
• Quizzes – 25%
• Midterm – 25%

For those who missed a quiz, I used the single quiz score I have record of.

We’ll be going over it together in class, but for the impatient, here’s a statistical breakdown of the midterm exam grades.

Things are, I’m sure, getting a little more interesting in lab. A point in the semester has been reached where we’ve accrued that necessary critical mass of information and can start tackling the more challenging problems. More challenging problems = more difficult labs = greater senses of satisfaction upon completing them.

To complete the upcoming labs, though, you really need to have mastered all the material we’ve covered to date. If you haven’t — and it’s quite likely you haven’t entirely — you’ll essentially be forced to. This is a good thing, really!

Besides banging your head against a keyboard, monitor, or other solid object, a great way to wrap your head around a problem and come up with an approach is with someone else. Two heads are better than one, especially when it comes to programming — the silliest problems and bugs are often invisible to our own eyes, and team sessions are invaluable for brainstorming a solution to a seemingly intractable problem.

That said, though, we cannot evaluate your personal progress based on team output. Please remember that solutions to lab exercises must be entirely your own. Discussion is highly encouraged between students (and their TAs), especially where the approach to a problem is concerned. Coding up a solution, though, should be an individual exercise. If you really need help debugging a program, enlisting a friend is okay, but take care not to share lines of code. If in doubt, ask your TA or myself.

The policy I’ve stated and asked the TAs to enforce is, quite simply, that plagiarism of any sort will not be tolerated. It’s a clear policy that’s fair to everyone.

Please leave your comments below, and happy coding!

The examples repository at gibhub has been updated to include all the sample code we’ve gone through in class together, including the program containing solutions for Quiz 2. You can check it out here.

I’ve had a few folks e-mail and ask me after class about the editor that I use for my own programming. Its name is “Textmate”, and it can be purchased at http://macromates.com/ — it is unfortunately Mac only. I highly recommend it — I spend an average of 5-10 hours a day sitting in front of it and still love most things about it. Another great (not-for-free) Mac text editor is BBEdit.

If you’re looking for a free editor that does (much more than just) the job, you should check out Smultron and TextWrangler.

Once upon a time, programming had logical operators in symbol form. One Japanese man (and lots of others) thought it would be just swell if those symbols could be replaced with words. What a novel idea! Reading English words to mean English ideas! It would be grande! And for a time, it was; that is… until people saw that it had gone horribly, horribly wrong….

Continue reading ‘and, or, not, &&, ||, and !, Oh my!’ »

Hey All!!

So apparently there is a class in the room I had picked for Office Hours.  Therefore, I will be available in Stuart 112.  As of right now, my office hours are still Mondays from 3:15-4:15. If this time doesn’t work for you or if you need to ask questions or just get in contact with me, feel free to send me an email mmccabe@iit.edu or catch me online AIM (imscrcrazy) or Yahoo (mathgeek50@ymail.com).