SYSC 1100: Object-Oriented Computing (Fall 2010)

FLASHLatebreaking News

Ø  None, the course is over.

In the Fall 2010 term, Professor Kunz was teaching SYSC 1100: Introduction to Object-Oriented Computing. The online calendar description can be found here. This page contains some information about the course and links to additional resources available to the class, either provided by the instructor or existing in the Internet. To find out more about the format of documents made available on this course webpage, read the comments on this page.

Students who do not write the final exam have the option to write an exam at a later point in time. This rule, aimed at students who are sick during exam periods, apparently leads to some abuse by students who strategically choose which exam to write when. In an effort to be fair to students who cannot write the exam for a legitimate reason, while at the same time discouraging the abuse of this rule, the following policy has been used by some faculty members:

Students taking supplemental or deferred examinations have several more months to study than their colleagues. Also they have a less-crowded examination schedule. Thus it is only fair to the majority of students to expect a substantially better performance on these examinations than on the final.

This is the policy that I will also adopt for this course. Please note that the above formulation leaves it up to the instructor whether the supplemental or deferred examination will be harder or the marking scheme will be more rigorous.

A note on assignments and cheating: the assignments are individual assignments. Evidence of cheating will be investigated and will be reported to the Associate Dean, see also General Regulations 14. Cheating consists of collaboration (handing in someone else's solution as your own as well as allowing someone else to copy your solution) and extensive quoting from textbooks and other sources without proper reference. I do encourage students to discuss the assignment questions with each other, and to consult textbooks and other sources to derive an answer. However, I also do expect students to hand in solutions that are clearly their own effort, clearly identifying the extensive use of external sources (and your classmates do not count as valid external sources).

Course Documents (Handout, additional information, exams, etc):

·        Official Course Handout

·        Health and Safety manual (for work in the computer labs)

·        Software: if you want to run Python on your own PC/laptop, you can download Python from the Python website, http://www.python.org/. The examples in class and the setup in the lab are based on the last stable version of Python, Python 2.7. You can also download the IDE that is available in the lab for free, at http://wingide.com/wingide-101/index. Finally, the cs1graphics package/module that is used extensively in the course textbook can be downloaded from here.

·        Controversy over Control Statements: Goto Considered Harmful (Considered Harmful)

·        Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

Lab Exercises:

·        None, the term is over

Programming Assignments:

·        None, the term is over

Quizzes:

·        None, the term is over

Course Outline (subject to change):

1.      Cornerstones of Computing

2.      Getting Started in Python

3.      Elementary Control Structures

4.      Additional Control Structures

5.      Input, Output, and Files

6.      Defining your own Classes

7.      Object Management

8.      Recursion

9.      Event-Driven Programming

10.  Network Programming

These topics correspond to specific chapters in the course textbook, and the list is mostly based on the suggested “Back to Basics” flow of covering the course material. I expect that you read the course textbook in preparation for the lectures, the pop quizzes may cover material assigned as homework reading. I will be using a subset of the slides provided by the textbook authors. Student resources for the textbook at provided at www.prenhall.com/goldwasser.