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Course Catalog:
A second programming course which reinforces the programming constructs learned in CS 2370 and covers more advanced programming techniques. Students learn about the client/server paradigm, how to create graphical user interfaces and event-driven program structure, and how to use basic data structures such as stacks, queues, lists, and trees. Students write applications using basic networking and multithreading techniques. Three lecture hours and 2 hours of computer lab. Falls and Springs.
Prereq: CS2370

Course Info #

• Instructor: Nat Tuck
  • Email: nathaniel.tuck@plymouth.edu
  • Office: D&M 305
• Course Site: https://homework.quest/ click “cs2381”
• Semester: Fall 2023 (Aug 28 - Dec 15)
• Lecture: Mon, Wed, Fri at 11:15am-12:05pm in D&M 442
• Lab in D&M 404
  • Section 01: 10am-11:40am
  • Section 02: noon-1:40pm
• Final Exam: Mon Dec 11th, 11am-1:30pm in D&M 442
• Office Hours:
  • Mon 1-2pm @ D&M 305
  • Wed 9-10am @ D&M 305
  • By appointment

Student Learning Outcomes #

Successful students will:

• Understand how to structure data in computer programs, including the roles of several common data structures.
• Be comfortable writing medium-sized programs in a modern programming language like Java.
• Be able to determine the computational complexity of many algorithms.
• Practice reading and understanding computer code written by themselves and others.
• Consider creative solutions to programming problems.

Texts #

There is no required textbook 🪳 for this course.

Grading #

The number of points available in an assessment may (or may not) exceed the denominator used in the grade calculation. For example, if the final exam offers 104 points out of 100, then a perfect score would count as 26% towards the final course grade.

Letter grades

≥ 93 → A, ≥ 90 → A-,
≥ 87 → B+, ≥ 83 → B, ≥ 80 → B-,
≥ 77 → C+, ≥ 73 → C, ≥ 70 → C-,
≥ 67 → D+, ≥ 63 → D, ≥ 60 → D-,
else (< 60) → F

Labs

Lab projects will be assigned weekly throughout the semester. These may have both programming components and questions to answer.

You may be assigned to work with a partner, in which case pair programming is strongly suggested. In assigning partners, sometimes there ends up being a team of one or three. Students not present at a lab meeting may be assigned to work alone for the associated assignment.

All team members are responsible for and get credit for any work submitted as a team. Any team member who believes their teammates aren’t doing their share of the work can leave a team and work alone until teams are next reassigned, but only such that the remaining members of the team have at least four days to complete any assignment before the due date.

Lab projects will be provided through an online web application called Inkfish and must be submitted through the same system. Unsolicited emailed labs will not be accepted.

A portion of your lab grade may be generated by an automatic grading script which runs when you submit your work. Unless there is a clear bug 🪳 in the script, the script output is that portion of your grade and will not be adjusted manually. You are being graded on getting the script to give you points. You should review the output, make corrections, and resubmit before the deadline if you are unhappy with the script results.

Script grades will be reduced if you submit work inconsistent with the text or spirit of the assignment, such as hard-coding outputs that should be calculated.

Lab Meeting Attendence

You are expected to show up for every course meeting, but especially for labs.

Each student starts with five points. Unexcused absenses lose a point.

Example: Having 7 unexcused absences from labs gives you a score of -2 out of 5. So if you earn 100% in the other categories your final grade will be a 93.

Exams

These will be on paper. Be prepared to write both English and code.

Grade Appeals

If you think you recieved an incorrect grade, send me an email describing why your grade is wrong and how you think it should be corrected.

If the grade isn’t clearly wrong, I will ask you to stop by my office hours so we can discuss the issue in more detail.

Fair Grading Policy

All grading in this class is subject to the university Fair Grading Policy.

Late Work

Work submitted after the deadline loses 1% per hour late.

If you are unable to submit an assignment on time due to a circumstance covered by the university Excused Absence Policy then you can request an extension. If you are granted an extension and submit by the extended deadline then the late penalty will be removed. If such an extension could reasonably be requested before the assignment deadline then it must be.

Late Registration

If you register late for the course please contact the professor to discuss completing any missed assignments as soon as possible.

Course Evaluations

Course evaluations can be a valuable tool to determine how the semester went. They’re more useful with a higher response rate.

To encourage more responses, each class has the chance to earn a 1% bonus to everyone’s final grade. This bonus applies if at least 75% of the students complete their evaluations by 10am on the Monday of finals week.

Resources #

Tutoring #

There is evening tutoring in the lab classroom. See the course website for more details. The PASS Office also offers individual tutoring.

Accomodations #

Plymouth State University is committed to providing students with documented disabilities equal access to all university programs and facilities. If you think you have a disability requiring accommodations, you should contact Campus Accessibility Services (CAS), located in Speare (535-3300) to determine whether you are eligible for such accommodations. Academic accommodations will only be considered for students who have registered with CAS. If you have authorized CAS to electronically deliver a Letter of Accommodations for this course, please communicate with your instructor to review your accommodations.

Academic Integrity #

Please carefully read and be familiar with the unversity Academic Integrity Policy. Especially don’t do any of the things in the list of examples of academic integrity violations.

For the projects in this class you will be submitting software source code. To avoid plagiarism, make sure to adhere to the following:

• You are expected to base your work on any starter code provided with the assignment. No further attribution is required.
• You (or your team) are expected to write your own code. By submitting any code that wasn’t part of the starter code, you are implicitly asserting that it’s your (or your team’s) work.
• There will be code examples in class. Submitting code from these examples is allowed with attribution. It’s also explicitly allowed without attribution, but there will be a small grade penalty.
• All other code is not allowed.
• Disallowed code submitted with attribution will lose points for not doing that part of the assignment.
• Disallowed code submitted without attribution is plagiarism. The academic integrity policy applies.

The simplest way to provide attribution for a chunk of code is a comment indicating what code needs attribution, who wrote it initially, where you found it, and whether you significantly changed it.

Examples:

// This method is based on Planet.getName from Prof. Tuck's lecture 
// notes of Sept 18.

// This method came from StackOverflow user Ashutosh
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2393906/java-method-to-swap-primitives

Keep in mind that providing project solution code to another student is also an academic integrity violation.

Discussion of lab projects that doesn’t involve specific solution code is encouraged. Getting the whole class together to draw pictures on a whiteboard is a valid project strategy.

Partner assignment are expected to be done working together. You have at least some responsibility for any work submitted for your team.

You may not post solutions for assignments in this class publicly.

Tentative Schedule #

The initial plan is for assignments to be due at 11:59pm on Monday.

• † No class on Monday (Labor Day)
• ‡ No class Wed, Thu, Fri (Thanksgiving)
• There may be less than 14 labs.