UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Computer Science Division CS 61A Summer 2011 Colleen Lewis CS 61A: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs General Course Information Instructor Colleen Lewis 329 Soda Hall [email protected] Working from home If you have a home computer, you will want to get a Scheme interpreter for it. The Computer Science Division can provide you with free versions of Scheme for Linux, Windows, or MacOS. The distribution also includes the Scheme library programs that we use in this course. You can download copies of this distribution and notes about connecting from home at the following links: http://inst.EECS.Berkeley.EDU/~scheme http://inst/connecting.html We will also be posting videos online and holding additional office hours to help you get your home computer set-up. Textbooks The textbook for this course is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman, second edition. It should be available in the textbook section of the ASUC bookstore and other local textbook sellers. You must get the 1996 second edition! Don’t buy a used copy of the first edition. The book can also be read online, at http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html In addition to the textbook, there are a lot of resources online. All labs, homework, projects, lecture notes, discussion notes, and all solutions will be posted online. In previous semesters there has been a set of unchanging reference material for the course called “Reader Volume 2”. You can also access this online or get a copy from a friend that has taken the course. It has Brian Harvey’s lecture notes, which is the foundation of the lecture notes this summer. We have listed an optional text for the course, Simply Scheme, by Harvey and Wright. It really is optional! This textbook gives a slower and gentler introduction (with lots of practice problems) to the first five weeks of 61A, for people who feel swamped here. Laboratory and Discussion Sections In addition to the lectures Monday-Thursday, the course consists of two discussion sections and two lab sections each week. (You will probably also use some additional un-scheduled lab time to do homework problems.) NOTE: The first Tuesday’s discussion section will meet in the lab! Students ask whether section attendance is required or optional. Our expectation is that you will attend all class sessions. Much of the learning in this course comes from lab activities, and later assignments (including exam questions) may build on those activities. It is up to you to find out what happened at any class session that you miss.Enrollment/Waitlist Please sign-up for a section that is not full. Telebears will be our source for what students are in each section. Please try to be in a final section on Telebears by the third day of class. You must have a computer account on the 61A course facility. This will be distributed by your TA in the first lab. You must set up your account this week. If you are pre-enrolled but do not set up your account this week, you may be dropped from the course. The first time you log in, you will be asked to type in your name and student ID card number, if you have one. Please follow the instructions carefully. You must get your account and log into it no later than 4pm Wednesday so that we have an accurate class count. (In any case, you should be doing the first homework assignment by then.) Groups Your first and most important resource for help in learning the material in this course is your fellow students. Your discussion section TA will assign you to a group of four students, and you will do all course activities with this group. You are responsible for helping each other learn. Getting Help Tutors & Lab Assistants The class will have a staff of undergraduate Lab Assistants and Tutors (LAs/Tutor). Lab assistants will help during scheduled labs. Tutors will have scheduled hours to be in the lab outside of the schedule labs. Some people are both lab assistants and tutors. These hours will be posted on the class website. Whenever an LA/Tutor is in the lab you may request that s/he answers questions about the homework or programs (but not do them for you). The instructor and the Teaching Assistants who teach the discussion sections are also available to answer questions. You may drop in during office hours, make appointments for other times, or communicate with us by email. All office hours are posted on the class webpage. During scheduled lab sessions, only students enrolled in that particular section may use a workstation. However, if you have a question, feel free to stop in and ask a TA. At other hours, any 61A student may use the lab on a drop-in basis. (The labs on the second floor of Soda Hall are unlocked during daytime hours.) Newsgroup We’ll be using a product called “Piazzza” for answering questions that are not specific to a single student. You have to register for an account with Piazzza. The registration web page is http://www.piazzza.com/class#cs61asummer2011/0 For technical questions about the homework or about the computer facility, post your questions to Piazzza, but please don’t post your homework solutions before the assignment is due. You should check regularly for announcements, and this is also the best place to ask technical and administrative questions. If you have a question about code you can email all TA’s and Colleen by emailing [email protected] Lectures During lectures we’ll be using iClicker technology to have students answer multiple choice questions and respond to various questions. This “lecture” won’t look like other lectures; you’ll be thinking, writing code, and discussing ideas withyour peers. There will be 9 points awarded for participating in lecture using the iClickers. To earn these points you must answer iClicker questions in 70% of the lectures (roughly 21 lectures). My plan is to not grade these “clicks” based upon correctness. Although if it appears that people aren’t trying to get the questions correct, I’ll enforce a threshold to later lectures. This would mean that you have to get some percent of the questions correct to earn credit for that day. You must register your iClicker using the iClicker website. For those of you who miss lectures, or wish to see Brian
View Full Document
Unlocking...