Assignment 1

• a–Lab-Book
• b–Weekly Programming Exercises
• c–Exam

Part a—Lab book

Each week you should publish your notes from that week. This is quite a big change to the way you’ve probably worked in the past, but you’ll find it incredibly valuable.

This is what it says in the course outline:

A lab book is a record of what you’ve learned, what you are going to try next and a reference for next time you encounter the same problem. Students will assemble one document per week that they will post to the course’s Medium publication (medium.com/code17). This will cement concepts by writing about, and illustrating, them. There is also value in reading and commenting on other students’ lab books as a way of distributing the effort of learning.

DELIVERABLES: 14 Medium blog posts. These will be marked in two parts. Half the mark is for weekly presence; is there something posted by 7pm on Thursday? The other pass will be for quality which will happen in one go in week 15, which will give time for tidying up and refinement.

I find that the best way to do a lab book entry is to open a file, either in your editor or in Medium, and keep it open all week. (Save often!) Whenever you have an idea, or you get stuck on something, or you see something cool, write about it.

In practice, imagine that you are writing some beautiful code, but one part of it looks a bit inelegant. You could write that down. You could also make a note of what you found that helped you make it better. You can record links to the Stack Overflow posts that you referenced, or to some blog posts.

You can (and should) also use it for general musings. Perhaps you notice that the law would be better if it was written as a programming language, or you read about some new thing in quantum computing, or that you renamed a whole folder of files with a python script. Maybe even just your thoughts on the world in general. It’s always nice to go back in time and see what thoughts you were having together.

There are also specific things that we’ll ask you to put into your lab book. There is going to be some discussion of data ethics, and there will probably be other things along those lines too.

The medium app (iOS, Android) makes it really easy to post from anywhere, so you could be on the bus or the beach and still posting. It’s also easy to put in pictures. So do; lots of them! Draw diagrams in your sketch book and photograph them, take screen grabs, take photos of the world, then put them all into your lab book.

The way the marking for this works is that each week is worth 1% of your total mark. You get that mark just for posting something. The other 14% is for the quality of your whole lab book. That part is assessed in week 15.

Writing down your thoughts is really valuable. We have a rule at work that we’re not allowed to get stuck on a problem for more than an hour. If it gets to an hour then we write it up, usually as a Stack Overflow question. That said, we only post about ¹⁄₅^th of the questions because the act of writing them makes the problem clear enough to solve it.

This is worth a whopping 28% of your marks! Doing a good job of this will be good for your mind and good for your marks.

Part b–Weekly Programming Exercises

For the first part of the course there will be structured exercises for you to complete.

Again, this is what it says in the course outline:

Each week until the mid semester break there will be tasks for you to complete. These will be briefed during the contact time. These are marked automatically, but the code used to mark them will be available to you so you can tell if your work will pass or not.

DELIVERABLES: Each week at the cutoff time (7pm the following Wednesday) each student’s GitHub repository will be parsed by a script and the code present will be marked. It will either pass or fail the tests. Feedback will be given in a communal way through the discussion forum. (No submission in week 7.)

These exercises are very dependent on GitHub. Each week you’ll update your fork with the latest version of the course repo using git fetch upstream (as described here). That’ll have the latest version of the exercises in it.

A typical exercise will have a function stubbed out, e.g.:

    def exercise1(dog, cat, pig):
        pass

and then below that there will be another function that tests that function. You should be able to run the code right away and it’ll fail all the tests. (N.B. the tests might also be in a test.py file to keep things neat.)

    def test_exercise1(dog, cat, pig):
        expect = "Spot, Felix and Babe all had tea"
        if exercise1("spot", "felix", "babe") == expect
            print "good job - " + expect

Your job will be to make the function pass all the tests. This will be an exercise in writing code, but also in reading it. The tests will tell you all about what is expected from that function.

These will be marked at 7pm on Thursday of the following week. It’ll be automatic. You push your changes to your repo, then I’ll pull them down onto my machine. If the tests pass on my machine then you’ll get the mark. If they don’t then you won’t.

Part c–Exam

Just to check that you can do this stuff under pressure, there will be an exam!

This will test recall on basic principles and your ability to apply them. The subject of the questions will be given ahead of time, but the specifics will only be revealed on the day.

The exam will work exactly like the weekly exercises, except we’ll only release the actual tests at the start of the exam, and the cut off will be at the end of the exam.