Instructor: Kurt Eiselt
Office: College of Computing 119
Electronic Mail: eiselt@cc.gatech.edu
Phone: 404-894-8386
Office Hours: Tuesday, Thursday 3:00-4:00PM
Teaching Assistants:
The TAs will hold weekly office hours as follows in the CCB Commons area:
| Name | Time | Day |
| Mitch Halpin (head TA) mphalpin@cc.gatech.edu | 3pm to 5pm | Mondays |
| Kelly Lyons johngalt@cc.gatech.edu | noon to 2pm | Mondays |
Course Description: CS 1321X is an accelerated version of CS 1321, the College of Computing's introductory course in computer science. Unlike the other sections of CS 1321, this section assumes prior experience with computer programming. Because 1321X students already have some competence with programming and related computing concepts, we will be able to move through the material covered in the other sections at a faster pace and have time to explore additional topics. (CS 1321X is not, however, an honors course. No special distinction will appear on your transcript or your diploma for successful completion of CS 1321X.)
CS 1321X will differ from the other sections in other important ways as well. For example, we'll provide:
Enrollment in CS 1321X is by permit only. If you are an incoming freshman computer science major and would like to enroll in CS 1321X, you must attend the computer science freshman orientation on Saturday, August 16 and fill out a questionnaire. If you are an incoming freshman but not a computer science major, you should stop by the College of Computing's Student Services Office on Friday, August 15 or Monday, August 18 to fill out the questionnaire. Or you could try hunting down Kurt Eiselt sometime during the first week and ask to fill out a questionnaire.
Prerequisites: Some competence and confidence with some computer programming language and familiarity with some fundamental computing concepts.
Programming Environment: As the title of your textbook suggests (see below), we'll be using a programming language called Scheme. The specific environment we'll be using is called Dr. Scheme, and you can download it from this page.
Required Text: "Exploring Computer Science with Scheme" by Oliver Grillmeyer (Springer-Verlag, 1998). Note: Do not buy the blue textbook, "How to Design Programs"...that's for the other CS 1321 sections. Remember: buy the red book, not the blue book.
Recommended Texts: The aforementioned "How to Design Programs" (MIT Press, 2000). We'll borrow from this text, but you don't need to buy it. It's all available on the web at http://www.htdp.org.
Well also recommend some Python resources if it looks like we'll have time to talk about that language, but don't worry about that just yet.
Newsgroups:
There will be several newsgroups...
git.cc.class.cs1321x.announce -- for announcements about changes or
corrections about labs, homework, and tests, among other things --- you
are expected to read this newsgroup daily
git.cc.class.cs1321x.questions -- for general questions or concerns
about the lectures, recitations, course policies, etc.
git.cc.class.cs1321x.hw -- questions about the homework
git.cc.class.cs1321x.lab -- questions about the lab
Course Requirements and Grading:
How your grade will be computed:
labs 10.0%
homeworks 10.0%
quiz 1 10.0%
quiz 2 20.0%
quiz 3 20.0%
final exam 30.0%
------
total 100.0%
With respect to letter grade cutoff points, the cutoffs will probably be as follows:
85.00 to 100.00 % = A
70.00 to 84.99 % = B
60.00 to 69.99 % = C
50.00 to 59.99 % = D
0.00 to 49.99 % = F
As we approach the end of the semester and see how everyone is doing, we may adjust these cutoffs, but only in ways that would result in students' grades getting better (if they change at all). We will not adjust these cutoffs in the other direction. For example, the cutoff for an A might change to 84%, but it won't change to 86%.
Late and Make-Up Policy: Assignments and labs are due by the day and time specified in their respective descriptions. Students are expected to arrive for quizzes and exams no later than fifteen minutes after the start time. In order to protect the integrity of the evaluation process, students arriving more than fifteen minutes late may not be allowed to take the quiz or exam. Any requests for exceptions to this policy due to Institute-approved absence from campus, incapacitating illness, death in the family, or something similarly serious must be accompanied by supporting documentation. Caution: the preprinted note from the infirmary stating that you visited the infirmary is not sufficient documentation.
Collaboration Policy:
We have chosen to move the burden of assessment of students' knowledge
of programming concepts and skills from homework assignments to
in-class exams. Homework assignments are now opportunities for
learning and discovery; they are not instruments of evaluation. (In
fact, the only reason homework assignments are considered in the final
grade is to motivate students to work on the assignments.)
Because homework assignments are now not used for assessment, we can
greatly relax the constraints on collaboration with respect to
these assignments. Any and all forms of
collaboration between students in CS 1321X are permitted, including the
sharing of solutions if that is what is needed for a student to learn
to develop a working solution to a given homework problem.
As has always been the case, however, plagiarism is not allowed. If
you use sources other than those provided for everyone in the course
(i.e., instructors, teaching assistants, the textbook, the course web
site, the course newsgroups, the lectures, or the recitations), you
must give appropriate credit to those sources. Note that so long as
you give credit where credit is due, your grade will not be affected
nor will you be charged with academic misconduct. On the other hand,
a failure to give appropriate credit to sources of help (other than
course materials or personnel as noted above) will be treated as
plagiarism, a violation of Georgia Tech's Student Conduct Code.
To ensure that you give credit where credit is due, we require
that you place a collaboration statement at the beginning of every set
of homework solutions you submit. That collaboration statement should
say either:
"I worked on the homework assignment alone, using only
course materials."
"I worked on this homework with [give the names of the
people you worked with], used solutions or partial
solutions provided by [name the people or other sources],
and referred to [cite any texts, web sites, or other
materials not provided as course materials for CS 1321X]."
Here are the due dates for the labs:
Lab 1: Tuesday, September 2
Lab 2: Friday, October 3
Lab 3: Friday, October 17
Lab 4: Friday, October 31
Lab 5: Friday, November 14
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Week 14
Week 15
Week 16
Exam Week
Last revised: December 11, 2003 Lambda monkey graphic by James Hays