Course Policies

• Course Description
• Code of Conduct
• Course Resources
• Computers
• Notebook
• Homework
• Procrastination
• Technical Glitches
• Turning in Assignments
• Assignment Evaluation
• Java Style Conventions
• Grading
• Academic Integrity
• Acceptable Use Policy

Course Description

From the Polytechnic School Course of Study:

The AP Computer Science A course at Poly has a wonderful series of topics. In here you will be:

• learning about computational thinking and computer science
• getting practice using one of the most popular programming language in the world, Java
• learning how to write computer programs
• developing an understanding of the principles of object-oriented programming (OOP)
• learning how to use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop software on your own computer
• using version control (git and GitHub) to manage software projects
• interacting with a Linux server using SSH
• learning the fundamentals of computer hardware
• discussing the fundamentals of encryption and privacy
• programming some graphics and animations (using the Processing library)
• discussing the potential impacts of technology on culture and society, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it!

Code of Conduct

The instructors of this course are dedicated to providing a respectful, harassment-free community for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment or bullying of any community member in any form.

Harassment includes

• deliberate intimidation
• bullying
• sustained disruptions of classes, chats, electronic meetings, physical meetings, or other events
• offensive verbal/electronic comments related to personal characteristics or choices
• sexual images or comments in public or online spaces
• stalking or following
• harassing photography or recording
• inappropriate physical contact
• unwelcome sexual attention

Participants asked to stop any harassing or bullying behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, representatives of the community may take reasonable action they deem appropriate including warning the offender and reporting the behavior to school administrators.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please act to intercede, or ask for help from the instructor or any school teacher or administrator.

This Code of Conduct has been adapted from the one at PyLadies.com and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Course Resources

This course will assume that you make use of a number of different resources:

• Textbook: Downey & Mayfield's Think Java: How to think like a computer scientist, 2nd Edition (online or free PDF download)
• Course Website: crashwhite.com/apcompsci - content and resources
• Course Server: used by all of us to work on and share documents
• Instructor: provides presentations, in-class demonstrations, and assignments designed to guide your learning.
• Classroom and/or Online Meetings: We'll be meeting regularly to develop new ideas and work on developing our understanding of computer science.

You will have access to a daily schedule for our class, online lectures that you will be asked to refer to before and after presentations in class, and copies of assignments and other resources used in the course. Daily assignments are typically available on your MyPoly portal, but this website is the canonical, authoritative reference for our work.

Computers

You will need a laptop for use in this course—any Apple or PC laptop running modern Windows, macOS, or Linux will work. Make sure that your laptop's battery is capable of holding a charge for the duration of class or that you have a power supply that you can plug in.

You will need to install software for this course, including the Java Development Kit (JDK), BlueJ IDE, and Visual Studio Code. Windows users will need to have access to the Linux Subsystem for Windows. Information on how to install this software is provided elsewhere on the website.

Notebook

Computer science is only partly about writing code on the computer—we make use of paper documents in here as well. You will need to take notes and draw diagrams as you learn our subject, and print or receive in class documents that you will need to save, store, and be able to access in a 3-ring binder. Either use a small section of a binder currently used for other classes, or get a half-inch 3-ring binder to be used for this class.

Homework

You will have work for this class that needs to be completed outside of our meeting time, including:

• reading/watching presentations online
• reading our course text
• writing programs on the computer
• uploading assignments to our server
• taking assessments (quizzes and tests, in class or online)

It may be the case that you occasionally find yourself stumped by some of problems on a particular assignment. In these cases, you are encouraged to:

• reference the content presentations on the course website
• talk with someone else in the class about the problem and how to go about solving it
• examine the pseudocode analysis or solutions, if available
• talk to the instructor

Occasionally you will have access to answer keys or solutions for some of our work.

Finally, you will often find yourself working, formally or informally, with other students in the class. When working with other students:

Procrastination

Thanks to your intelligence and excellent pattern recognition skills, you have probably become well-trained in the fine art of "putting things off till the last minute." In many of your classes, your ability to procrastinate has served you well.

Programming doesn't work like that.

The skills you'll be developing in here require time to sink in. Trying to fit a one-hour assignment into 15 minutes, or a ten-hour assignment into an hour-and-a-half, simply will not work.

Think of creating a piece of art. Whether it's a small or large, the work that you're creating takes time to develop—there aren't any shortcuts, and there are inevitably problems (see next section, Technical Glitches).

Recommendations:

• Keep good notes, and keep them organized. (The course website will also be available to you.)
• Keep your computer files organized and backed up.
• If you have the chance to get started on an assignment early—in class, even—do so. It will give you more time to think about the problem, to play with the problem, to benefit from discussions with others, and to ask the instructor for assistance.

I have every confidence that you'll figure this out sooner rather than later.

Technical Glitches

You can anticipate a wide range of technical glitches that will conspire to impede your progress in here. All of these happen to students in this course every year:

• A hard drive crashes, causing a student to lose all of their work for this course (and others).
• The Internet goes down for an hour, a day, or a week, at school or at home.
• Your computer is spilled on, dropped, lost, or stolen.
• You miss classes due to athletics, college visitations, illness, rehearsals for a play, or other schedule challenges.

None of these are excuses for turning in late work, with the possible exception of sudden or extended illness.

Plan for the unexpected, and try not to panic when your emergency plan fails. A missed homework assignment here or there won't be a problem for anyone, but a pattern of missed smaller assignments, or a major assignment that's not completed on time, will quickly become a problem. Do what you can to avoid finding yourself in that situation.

Turning in assignments

You'll have a number of different types of assignments in here, most of them involving writing programs in Java, and most of these programs will be written on your computer, either at school or at home. In order to "turn in" these assignments, you'll need to upload them to a directory on the course server reserved for such purposes.

Unless stated otherwise, programs assigned on a given day are due that evening by 12:00 midnight. At that time, the programs will often be automatically evaluated by testing software, so you can't afford to turn in assignments late. You are strongly encouraged to get your work done on these assignments early, so as to avoid any last-minute problems: the assignment was difficult, your connection was down, etc.

Assignment Evaluation

Evaluation of your work depends on the nature of the assignment. Quizzes, tests, and larger computer-based projects will be evaluated in a fairly traditional manner. Daily written homework assignments are worth fewer points but are an important aspect of your learning the material.

Homework assignments

Homework / short programming assignments will be evaluated in one of two ways.

1. Testers may be run on your program, with a variety of structured input causing your program to produce output, which is checked against the expected results. Test reports indicate the how well your programs satisfy the requirements of an assignment, and the grade earned reflects those measured requirements.
2. Qualitative analysis may be done using a system based on one used at Stanford. There are a number of different qualities any given program is evaluated on: efficiency, legibility, correctness, completeness, comments, etc. Under this system, a 5-point assignment has points are awarded on the following scale:

   Grade	Evaluation	Score
   ✓++	An absolutely fantastic submission of the sort that will only come along a few times during the quarter. Rarely awarded, but well-earned.	7/5 points
   ✓+	A submission that exceeds standard expectation for the assignment. To receive this grade, a program often reflects additional work beyond the requirements or gets the job done in a particularly elegant way.	6/5 points
   ✓	A submission that satisfies all the requirements for the assignment. It reflects a job well done.	5/5 points
   ✓-	A submission that meets the requirements for the assignment, possibly with a few small problems.	4/5 points
   ✓--	A submission that has problems that cause it to fall short of the requirements for the assignment.	3/5 points
   0	Assignment late, not submitted on time, or missing substantial work.	0/5 points

Quizzes, Projects, and Tests

Quizzes are often unannounced and will typically administered at the beginning of class during which you'll have 5 minutes or so to write a program, often based on the previous night's homework.

Projects are larger-scale assignments that typically take 2-5 days to complete, and working on these assignments is a favorite part of the course for many students. Projects typically require more planning, more coordination, and more work than the daily homework exercises, and thus are worth more points.

It is especially easy to find yourself falling behind in a project, so get started early. A project submitted past the deadline will suffer a late penalty. Projects submitted on time but that fail catastrophically may be resubmitted after meeting with the instructor. In either case, the maximum score possible is 80% of the original points possible.

Paper-and-pencil tests are administered every 3-5 weeks, typically after students have had plenty of time to write programs using material. A catastrophic test (score <70% of the points possible) can be made up after meeting with the instructor. The maximum score possible for a test re-take is 70% of the original points possible.

Grading

Your grade will be based on a percentage of points earned / points possible according to the following scale:

The approximate weighting of assignments in the course will be as follows:

Java Style Conventions for Poly's AP Computer Science A course

In order to assist you in writing, reading, and understanding the programs that you'll be working on in here, you'll be asked to follow a number of style conventions. These include:

1. Initial Comment for every program includes 7 lines of code, as shown in the example below.

   /**
    * FourRectanglePrinter class
    * Programming Exercise for AP Computer Science A
    *
    * @author Richard White
    * @version 2012-12-07
    */

2. Capitalization convention in code
   
   • variables and methods are written in all lower case— i, age, value. Variable and method names that consist of multiple words should be written using "camelCase": userName, getData, processTheResults.
   • Classes are written in camelcase but begin with a capital letter: Box, BankAccount, Vehicle, BirthdayParty.
3. Tabs/Spaces
   Blocks of code are indented. In here, you'll indent successive blocks of code by 4 spaces, not a tab. Most people prefer to use the tab key on their computer to indent, and set their text editor to automatically substitute four spaces for a tab.
4. Width of program
   Lines in a program may be up to 120-characters in width, but no more than that. Use the Enter key to create lines of code that are easy to read and understand.
5. Curly braces
   Curly braces { } indicate code blocks. In this course, the initial curly brace for a block will be placed below the previous line and lined up under the first character in the statement, rather than at the end of the statement on the same line. So we'll be writing:

   // CORRECT use of curly braces in Poly's AP Comp Sci course 
   for (i = 1; i <= n; i++)
   {
       double interest = balance * rate / 100;
       balance = balance + interest;
   }

We'll be developing additional conventions as the course proceeds.

Academic Integrity

In addition to assisting students with learning material, teachers are often responsible for assessing their progress. In order to do this, students may be given a number of different types of assignments: homework, quizzes, tests, in-class activities, laboratory experiments to conduct, research papers, individual and group projects, presentations, etc.

It is understood that for some of these assignments, students may collaborate with one another. Four lab partners may perform an experiment as a group and share data. A student team may design and present a project together. Students might consult each other to find out how to solve a homework problem. In these cases, collaboration is accepted and even encouraged.

In many cases, however, the teacher desires an individual assessment of the student, ie. an answer to the question: "How much progress has the student made in mastering the material?" These assessments, usually in the form of quizzes and tests, are to be performed without assistance from any other sources or students.

There are many ways that a student may cheat, but they all fall into one of four categories:

1. giving or receiving unauthorized information on tests, examinations, or other work (including labs)
2. copying another student's work, either word-for-word or by rephrasing
3. using any unauthorized aids on tests, examinations, or other work, or
4. submitting someone else's work, in whole or in part, for your own.

Thus, looking at someone else's test paper to copy the answer to a problem, discussing a test problem or sharing its solution with another student, copying test problems or answers and sharing them with another student, stealing a test, stealing the answers to a test, and using notes during a test that have not been expressly allowed by the teacher are all prohibited.

The penalties for cheating vary, depending on the institution, the department, the teacher, and the nature of the infraction. Commonly, a student caught cheating will receive a failing grade on the assignment and be subject to disciplinary action, including suspension and a letter being placed in the student's file. A friend of mine who is a professor states that at her university, there are a total of ten disciplinary actions possible in response to cheating, including: "expulsion, suspension (withdrawal from the University for a given period of time), mark reduction on the assignment or exam, reduction in the final course grade, a grade of F in the course, conduct probation, written reprimand, suspension of any degree already awarded, rescinding any degree already awarded."

Use your powers for good, not for evil.

Polytechnic School's Responsible Use Policy

In addition to these course policies, by using computers and the computer network at Poly you are tacitly agreeing to abide by the school's Responsible Use Agreement, which you are strongly encourage to read and understand. Violation of this policy may result in your loss of access to school technology, which is going to have a devastating effect on your ability to participate in this class! :)