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Course Information

Pre-requisites

This subject is aimed at first year students with little or no programming experience. Enrollment may be limited.

Goals

This subject has several related goals:

• Provide an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems.
• Help students, including those who do not necessarily plan to major in Course VI, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals.
• Position students so that they can compete for UROPs and excel in subjects such as 6.001.

Lectures, Homeworks and Quizzes

There will be two one-hour lectures a week, one recitation a week, and six hours of homework. Roughly two-thirds of the lectures will cover the main material of the subject. Other lectures will focus on a different exciting application of computing. Some of these lectures will be given by guest lecturers.

Each problem set will involve programming in Python. Students will make extensive use of libraries, so that it will be possible to write programs that solve real problems. There will be one midterm quiz and one final quiz, each given during regularly scheduled class hours.

Collaboration Policy

Problem sets: Our policy is simple: feel free to collaborate with each other on all the problem sets, but note with whom you collaborated. The assignments are intended to help you understand the material. Know the code and be prepared for occasional individual code reviews. During these reviews we may ask you to make modifications to your code while we watch.

Quizzes: You should not collaborate on the in-class quizzes.

Grading Policy

Grades will be roughly computed as follows:

Textbook

The course will use the following textbook:

This book is available at Quantum books, and online at Amazon.

Staff

Office Hours

Asfandyar
   By appointment. Email to set up a time.

Phil
   No advance sign-up required
   Fridays 4-6p
   Mondays 4-7p
   Location: room 34-501, Undergraduate Teaching Lab

Directions to 34-501

• Go to building 36 and take the elevators up to the 5th floor.
• Walk into building 34, through the door on your left (next to it, there is a sign with a big red 5). If the door is closed (late at night) and you want to work in the lab, the access code is 31846.
• Walk past the lockers to the end of the hall, before the doorway that leads to building 38.
• On your left will be the entrance to 34-501 (a pink door). There is no room number but there is a sign noting that it is the 'Pauline and Kenneth Germeshausen Undergraduate Teaching Lab'.
• The acces code is 39715* (this is not the athena access code). If you forget, the code is posted in the stock-room, through the door to building 38.