Syllabus

Table of contents

1. Overview
2. Course Meetings
   1. Lecture
   2. Labs
   3. Office Hours
3. Policies
   1. Grades
   2. Assignments
   3. Exams
   4. Cheating
4. Resources

---

Overview

CSCI100 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, Asserts
• Algorithms
• Runtime and efficiency
• Objects and Classes
• Sets and Dictionaries

Course Meetings

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 schedule page. You must attend the lecture/lab time that you are assigned on bisonweb.

Lecture

Lectures for this course will be conducted in person. Approximately half of our class time will be dedicated to covering the lecture material, while the remaining half will be focused on applying the concepts we’ve just learned through practice. Occasionally, I will assign pre-recorded lecture videos from a previous version of this course. During these sessions, our class time will be devoted to addressing any queries students might have about the material and working through practice problems. You are required to be present for each class, as there will be weekly quizzes given at random time duing class.

Labs

Lab for this course will be in person. Labs will allow you to apply the new concepts that you’re learning in lecture to broader, graded problems. You will be given problems to solve, that you’ll be able to work on with your peers in groups of 4. Your labs will be submitted on Codio and graded by the Codio autograder. Labs will be released each Wednesday evening, and will be due the following Tuesday at 11:59pm.

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 a mixture of in-person and virtual office hours at a wide variety of times. Virtual office hours will be held on Zoom, the link can be found at the course schedule page. In-person office hours will be held in your instructor’s office (LKD 1110G). You are welcome to come for any reason, including course material questions, lecture clarifications, industry interview prep, career path discussions, or just to hang out.

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

Grades

The class will not be curved. Instead, your final grade will be based on buckets of your overall score in the class that will be decided at the end of the semester based on the difficulty of the exams, quizzes, projects, labs, and homework.

Your overall grade will be calculated using the following relative weights:

Assignments

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

• ~8 Quizzes - random time during lecture time, once a week.
• ~12 Labs - 1x per week. Work w/ partners, submit individually
• 1 Project - Image Filter.

Assignments will be due at 11:59pm, with a 10% penalty per each day that the assignment is late up to 5 days total.

Exams

Instead of one midterm and one final exam, this course will have 3 exams, spaced evenly across the semester, with the third exam happening during finals week. Exam 1 will be on Wednesday, September 20th. Exam 2 is will be on Monday, November 6th. Exam 3 will take place during finals week.

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. It can be tempting to cheat. Know that Codio’s autograder has a very good plagiarism detector. Per Howard University policy, the first time an assignment is found to be plagiarized, the assignment grade will be zero-ed out for all students with matching code. The second time, all students involved will have their final course grade decreased by 1 letter grade (B going to a C, A- does to a B-, etc.). The third time, all students involved will be referred to the Dean’s office for academic dishonesty.

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.

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.

Resources

This course website, cs100.org, will be your one-stop resource for the syllabus, schedule, lecture videos, and assignment links. Additionally, we will be using the following software.

Codio You will get a link to sign up for this tool when we begin class. We will use Codio for editing and turning in assignments. Note that Codio may display a “grade” for you, but the official one is in Canvas.

EdStem This term we will be using EdStem for class discussion. The sustem is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions to EdStem. You can find the class EdStem here.

Canvas Your official class midterm and final 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.