Welcome to COP 3502

Introduction to Computer Science

This course is meant for undergraduate students just entering the Computer Science major, and interested students from other disciplines. It will give you a broad overview of different areas of computer science. This will enable you to get an idea of the types of issues studied, and the skills required, in the rest of the CS curriculum. You should have already received an email for the course survey. Please fill it up as soon as possible.

Instructor: Piyush Kumar
Class Timings: Mon, Wed : 5:15pm to 6:30pm, Love 103
Office Hours: Mon : 4:15pm to 5:15pm, Love 161
Textbook required: None
Teaching Assistant: Guru (narasimh at cs dot fsu dot ...)
Teaching Assistant Office: MCH 100B Tuesday, 10-11am

Pre-requisites: This course is aimed at students with little or no prior programming experience. I do expect you to have a desire to learn computer science. If you have a lot of prior programming experience, I would not like to waste your time. Please talk to me and I can suggest other options in this case. I want to maintain a friendly atmosphere of learning in this class, and would prefer not to have over-qualified students in this class. You should own a laptop or desktop and be root/administrator on that machine. You should be allowed to install/uninstall programs on that machine. Your machine should also be capable of running a web browser and playing mp4 files.

Expectation from Students

Course Description

Course covers basic computer organization, computer languages and software, language translation and interpretation, object oriented design, object oriented programming, classes, objects, and inheritance, file systems and I/O.

Grading Criterion


Weekly Assignments: Individual assignments will vary in weight according the amount of student effort required. The assignment grade will be the total points received divided by the maximum possible score, and multiplied by 90 to get a score in the range 0 to 90.

Exams: The Midterm and Final Exams will be closed book, closed notes exams, and will be proctored. The midterm will include topics covered before the midterm, and the final exam will include topics covered between the midterm and the final exam. The final exam is on May 1st, Wednesday between 5:30pm and 7:30pm in class.

Attendance and class participation: You will be given a grade for class participation toward the end of the semester, with a maximum obtainable score of 10. In particular, I will ask questions during lectures and recitations, and you should perform well in these. However, there may be deductions from your class participation score, for poor attendance, as explained below:

Attendance will be taken at the beginning of lectures, Monday and Wednesday. You should not miss more than three of these. You will lose 4 points for 4-5 absences, and all 10 points for more. The three misses are permitted to deal with valid reasons, such as sickness. Please do not assume that these are "free" misses, and that you will be permitted extra, excused absences for "valid" reasons. In rare cases, such as extended medical needs or jury duty exceeding three classes, absences may be excused with appropriate documentation. You should let me know in advance, when possible, and submit the documentation I seek.

Attendance will be taken when class begins, and so you will be marked absent if you come late. (Note: Your signature on the attendance sheet should match that on your FSU ID.) You will also be marked absent if you leave before class ends! Furthermore, you are responsible for making up for any materials missed due to absences. A missed exam can be made up only in extremely rare circumstances, and you should discuss it with me well ahead of time.

While attendance will not be formally taken during the recitation sessions, your absence may be noted, and may affect your class participation grades. You will have a greater scope for class participation during recitations, and so your grades will be affected through lower grades on class participation, if you do not attend recitation regularly.

Example:

  1. You get 6/10 for class participation, and have missed only three lectures. You have no attendance penalty, and so your score for class participation and attendance will be: 6.

  2. You get 6/10 for class participation, and have missed four lectures. You have an attendance penalty of -4, and so your score for class participation and attendance will be: 2.

  3. You get 2/10 for class participation, and have missed four lectures. You have an attendance penalty of -4, and your score for class participation and attendance will be: 0. (Note: Your score cannot not go below 0!)

  4. You get 6/10 for class participation, and missed three lectures because you wanted to attend parties. You then get sick and miss one more class, provide documentation on it, and hope that it will be excused. You will still have an attendance penalty of -4, since you had a valid reason for missing only one lecture and so your score for class participation and attendance will be: 2.

Course letter grade: Your grade will roughly be determined by the following procedure. The grades for assignments (maximum 90) and class participation (maximum 10) will be added together to give the total non-exam score (maximum 100). The midterm (maximum 50) and final exam (maximum 50) scores are added to get the total exam score (maximum 100). The grade for the course will be based on the lower of the grades of the exam and non-exam portions.

Example:

  1. You get 6/10 on class participation, 80/90 on assignments, 30/50 on the midterm, and 25/50 on the final exam. Your score for the course will be considered 55/100 (the lower of 86/100 on non-exam and 55/100 on the exam).

  2. You get 6/10 on class participation, 40/90 on assignments, 30/50 on the midterm, and 25/50 on the final exam. Your score for the course will be considered 46/100 (the lower of 46/100 on non-exam and 55/100 on the exam).
Once your score for the course has been computed, you will be given a letter grade based on the following chart:

Course average Letter grade
92 - 100 A
90 - 92 A-
88 - 90 B+
82 - 88 B
80 - 82 B-
78 - 80 C+
72 - 78 C
70 - 72 C-
60 - 70 D
0 - 60 F

Homework


Academic Honor Code

Because a primary goal of the course is to teach professionalism, any academic dishonesty will be viewed as evidence that this goal has not been achieved, and will be grounded for receiving a grade of F (You must read the FSU Academic Honor Code in the Student Handbook and abide by it). Copying/Modifying other people's programs/code will be treated the same as copying in an exam. Once again: There is no excuse for cheating in any circumstances. See me before you even contemplate cheating.

Lecture Slides

Source Acknowledgements: Earlier classes taught at FSU. Harvard and MIT Intro to CS Classes.

Interesting links