This is the course page for COMP1511's 20T1 offering.
The web page for COMP1511 20T2 is located at:
Hi COMP1511!
This is most likely the final notice that will go out via this page. As you may know already, your official marks have been released by UNSW and should be visible to you now via myUNSW.
If you would like a little more detail, we also have information via the same system we've been using to view marks as the term progressed: View Autotests/Submissions/Marking . As this is a Pass/Fail term, we are not able to give you a final tallied number mark, but we can at least give you feedback on the level of success you had with the Final Exam and the hurdles.
If you have any kind of variation in your mark, like it is currently witheld or has the code "LE" for Late Entry, your marks have not been finalised yet and you will be receiving an email in the next day or so explaining the situation.
If you have any queries about marks, you can email cs1511@cse.unsw.edu.au and we'll do our best to respond in between preparing COMP1511 for another cohort in just over a week.
It's been an epic ride this term . . . I've never seen a more disrupted term of teaching and hope to never see one like it again. Thank you all for continuing your studies even though I'm sure conditions weren't ideal for most of us. I wish you the best of luck in whatever you decide to do from here and hope to see you around campus whenever we get back there!
Marc Chee (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching staff)
PS: Chicken meowed at you, but she still doesn't know what all the fuss is about.
Hi COMP1511!
Firstly, we on the COMP1511 Teaching Staff want to congratulate you on finishing the final exam and the content for COMP1511. We've had a unique term together, and we hope you've enjoyed yourselves and grown as programmers, despite the unusual circumstances.
Additionally,
Assignment 2 Draft Automarking Results Have Been Released
You can now access your Assignment 2 automarking results via the "View Autotests/Submissions/Marking" link in the menu bar on WebCMS. If there are any issues with the automarking, you can contact your tutor and lab demonstrator via their email addresses (which you can find in the Timetable section). As the first pass is automated, there might be issues that we won't see initially, so it's worth checking (and also interesting to see how you fared in the initial testing).
Your tutors will be starting to mark your submissions by hand over the next few days. This will give you feedback on the code style and readability of the assignment , so that when it's marked, you will have special comments through your assignment pointing out potential style issues or giving advice on what you can do to help write your code cleanly. Be sure to check back on your submission in the next week or so and if it has been marked, there will also be some written feedback that might prove useful.
More information about our process of exam marking & releasing results will be posted later in the exam period.
All the best for any other exams you may have coming, and we wish you a restful holiday,
~Tom (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi COMP1511,
IT'S NOT OVER YET!!
We're pretty close to the end of the work you need to do to finish COMP1511, but we're not quite finished. Today we want to tell you about a few things:
Marc's Final Live Stream
Here's the link to
one final stream
that will be tomorrow, Monday at 3pm. This will be a bit of an AMA (Ask me anything) where I'll answer any final questions people have before the exam. I can go over any topics people feel unsure about and am open to helping, with no specific planned content.
The Final Exam is on Tuesday
Remember that the Final Exam for COMP1511 is a 24 hour take-home exam (that you will complete in your own home) that starts at 9am (AEST UTC +10) on Tuesday the 5th May.
By this time, you should have an email in your inbox from the class exam email account. This email will have details about how the exam will work and how you can complete it.
Please check to make sure you have received the exam email, it should be sent to your registered student email address. If you have any problems with that, please contact us via the
Course Forum
or at cs1511.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au
If you have any other problems with the exam, please feel free to contact us on the forum or cs1511.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi there COMP1511!
So, you thought the class was over? Well, we've got a few little things left this week to talk about . . .
Tutorials in Week 11
Some tutorials were interrupted by public holidays earlier in the term. If you had a tutorial on a Monday or a Friday, there are scheduled tutorials you can attend (at the same time of day) on Monday and Tuseday this week. These tutorial/labs are intended as a bit of a recap and revision session for anyone who would like to come along. If you are not scheduled to have a tutorial/lab this week (Tues to Thurs tutorials) you can still attend these revision sessions on Monday or Tuesday if you like.
These classes are on Blackboard Collaborate under new sessions eg: "Week 11 Monday - M09A" rather than the regular "M09A" Tut/Lab session.
Revision is available
In case anyone's looking for revision to cover before the exam, we have a batch of revision questions that cover the majority of the topics that are in COMP1511 available in the
Revision Section
of the Course Website. The Week 11 Tutorial also links there.
Assignment 2 has now passed its due date
Assignment 2 has now finished for most of you (barring anyone who has an extension or is rushing to finish after the due date). Since most of the support for the assignment has stopped now, please let us know if you have any issues and need any help. As always, you can email cs1511@cse.unsw.edu.au if you are having troubles and need to apply for an extension. The
Course Forum
is still available if people need coding help.
Reminder . . . the Final Exam, May 5th
The final exam will be a 24 hour take-home exam starting at Tuesday 5th
May
, 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time. If you'd like more information about the exam, I spoke at length about it in the
Week 10 Lectures
. We'll be sending out some information about the exam as we get closer to release. Note that a previous version of this notice said "April 5th" not "May 5th" - May 5th is the correct date.
Marc (on behalf of the 1511 Staff)
Hi COMP1511!
Just some reminders, and extra information about what's going on this week.
Assignment 2 Is Due this Sunday.
As a reminder, Assignment 2 is due this Sunday (April 26th) at 6pm AEST . If you haven't started, you should do so as soon as you can. If you need help, you can post on the Course Forum , or come to a Help Session .
Extra Capacity in Tut/Labs
To try and help with assignments, we have asked tutors in Thursday afternoon and Friday labs to allow a few extra students to attend. If you would like to attend a second lab this week, please choose a lab here (there are a limited number of spaces available; and it's first come, first served):
https://doodle.com/poll/7mc7qb2uqv7nntv4
Please note: Tutors have been asked to make sure students officially enrolled in their lab are helped first, before any extra students are seen. Tuts may run longer than the time shown in the Doodle Poll above, so you may have to wait for the tut to finish before attending the lab. It is possible you will not get helped in these labs, as it depends on their capacity. If you aren't helped in that lab, we will try make sure you are seen at a help session, but we cannot guarantee it.
Weekly Test for Week 10
There will be a weekly test for Week 10, released soon. This week 10 weekly test will be due
Sunday, 03 May
(10 days from now), and will contain exam-like questions to help with your revision.
~Tom (On behalf of the Course Staff)
CSESoc (the Computer Science & Engineering Society) and WIT (Women in Technology) are running a COMP1511 Study Session with Marc on Wednesday 22 April (tomorrow) from 2 - 4 PM. It is available to every student, regardless of whether you are a member of CSESoc or WIT. It will cover topics from the entire term. To register for the event, please fill in this form:
https://bit.ly/COMP1511StudySession
From 2 - 3 PM, several Kahoots will be run and live streamed on Youtube. To access the live stream, please use this link:
https://bit.ly/COMP1511LiveStream
From 3 - 4 PM, breakout rooms will be organised where you can ask for help from volunteers. It will be run on CSESoc's Discord Server. To join the server, please use this link:
https://bit.ly/COMP1511Discord
Please note that students are expected to adhere to the UNSW Code of Conduct during this event.
Hi COMP1511!
We're here at our final teaching week of COMP1511.
This week in class we'll be covering a lot of preparation for the Final Exam, which will be a 24 hour Take-Home exam that is designed to be run entirely remotely. You will not be expected to be at UNSW in any way during the exam. We'll cover the format and specific advice for success in the lectures (as well as some revision of everything we've seen in the course).
Some exam details
(more to come in the lecture):
We've already found some cases of plagiarism in the first assignment for COMP1511 where people have shared code or had someone from outside COMP1511 complete assignment work for them. These cases will be investigated after the exam and will highly likely result in a mark of zero for the assignment itself.
Do not do the same thing in the exam. We will be using the same plagiarism detection techniques in the exam and if we find the same level of collaboration or work from outside sources, this will highly likely result in a "Fail" mark for COMP1511.
Tutorials and Labs this week
Alongside the Lectures this week, our Tutorials and Labs will be covering some parts of the exam. There are example questions in the Lab as well as details on how the auto testing and submission works, so it's a good idea to complete those questions from the same computer/setup that you plan to use for the exam. We 100% understand that we aren't able to give you a solid guaranteed exam environment like we would in our labs, so if there are any issues during the lab, it's good to let us know this week so we can try to help you get any of the issues out of the way before the real exam.
MyExperience Survey
You may have already received an email from UNSW about the MyExperience survey for this course. Here's a
link
to where you can fill out the course survey. We've put a reminder in the tutorial and lab this week about this also. Please fill out the survey, it's quite important for us to know how well the term has gone and especially if you have any feedback about your experiences in taking the course, it's important for us so that we can improve the course for future students.
We hope everyone has a good week and that Beats by CSE is treating you well so far! Remember that it's due next weekend, so if you need help at all, please use the Help Sessions , Forums or even better, the two hours of your lab this week to talk to your tutor about it.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi all,
Just letting you know that we've finalised the changes to the Course Outline that we have been mentioning in notices and lectures.
A summary of everything that has changed since COMP1511 was forced to change to online delivery:
All of these changes are now in the Course Outline if you need to check on them. I will also be talking through the Final Exam in the last week of lectures.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi All,
This message is to let you know that some small clarifications to the specification for
Assignment 2
have been made.
The behavior of the autotests and reference implementation has
not
changed. Here are all the details of the changes:
If you have questions, find issues, or think you have been adversely affected by any of these changes, please post on the course forum.
Hi COMP1511!
We're going into Week 9 now and the second Assignment, Beats by CSE is in full swing. If you have any issues with the assignment, remember that the Course Forum and Help Sessions are available!
Most everyone should have their results back for Assignment 1, which you can view in the View Marking section of the course website. Be sure to look through the actual text of the marking to see useful feedback on how to improve your code readability for Assignment 2.
A reminder also that since today was a public holiday and no tutorial/labs were running, anyone with a Monday scheduled lab will want to attend one of the other tutorial/labs later in the week. Check the Timetable for when these time slots are.
Remember also that the live stream lectures will be kept "unlisted" so they're only available to class members. I'm still allowing them to be publicly available afterwards, but if you want to attend the lecture when it's actually delivered, use the link in the Week 9 Lectures section.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi all,
Just wanted to let everyone know that you won't see anything popping up on my YouTube channel for live streams after today's unfortunate brush with internet fame :P
The lectures and the communications you have with me are for the students of the course, not necessarily for a large number of the public (and spam bots) so my lectures will now only go public after they've been streamed.
To take part in the live streams, you will now need to use the actual links to reach them. This week's links are:
Marc (newly famous on the internet)
Hi COMP1511!
We have some Public Holidays coming up in the next week which will affect anyone who's in a Monday or Friday tutorial.
This Friday, 10th April and next Monday 13th April are both public holidays, so Tutorials and Labs will not be running at those times. Anyone scheduled to be in Tutorial/Lab sessions at those times should try to find one of the other sessions to attend. Times are listed in our Timetable and anyone is free to attend any tutorial/lab session in the weeks of public holidays.
There will be catchup tutorial/lab sessions for all the postponed labs. These sessions will be available for help with revision of course content and answering questions for people looking to study for the exam.
Any Tutorial/Lab scheduled for the 10th April will have a lab session running on Tuesday the 28th April.
Any Tutorial/Lab scheduled for the 13th April will have a lab session running on Monday the 27th April.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi there COMP1511,
Assignment 2 - Beats by CSE
We're about to roll into Week 8 of the course and so we have our Second Assignment, which has just been released!
It's called Beats by CSE and the theme this time is digital music composition. The spec is available in the Assignments section of the class website and it's worth having a look at it before your tutorial this week.
I (Marc) will be live streaming this Friday afternoon (exact time and link will be shared later) specifically in support of the assignment . . . we'll talk then about the structure, the marking scheme and how to approach the assignment.
This week's course material has a lot of support for Beats, with the lectures specifically looking at using Linked Lists while the Tutorials and Labs will also be focused on extending our knowledge of how they work. Hopefully, even if the assignment itself seems daunting, after next week, you'll be a good situation to get started.
Assignment 1 - Minesweeper
For a lot of people, Assignment 1 - Minesweeper is in the process of being marked by your tutors. As I've mentioned before, if you have any issues with how the automarking went or issues with submission etc, please contact your tutor (you can find their email via the
Timetable
. The preliminary marking is done automatically, but we will overrule the automatic marks if we see there are any changes we need to make.
If you need to check your marks, they're available via the View Marks section of the course website.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 teaching staff)
Hello COMP1511!
Assignment 1 - Minesweeper preliminary marking (not final!)
Just letting you know that your Minesweeper assignments have been run through our automatic marking system and you will be able to see the results in the
View Autotests/Submissions/Marking
section of the course website. If there are any issues with the automarking, you can contact your tutor and lab demonstrator via their email addresses (which you can find in the
Timetable
section. As the first pass is automated, there might be issues that we won't see initially, so it's worth checking (and also interesting to see how you fared in the initial testing).
Your tutors will be starting to mark your submissions by hand over the next few days. This will give you feedback on the code style and readability of the assignment, so that when it's marked, you will have special comments through your assignment pointing out potential style issues or giving advice on what you can do to help write your code cleanly. Be sure to check back on your submission in the next week or so and if it has been marked, there will also be some written feedback that might prove useful.
Special Consideration
There have been some changes to Special Consideration now that there are purely online assessments like our Exam that will be happening after the end of term (the exact date hasn't been finalised by UNSW yet, but they will still try to schedule us so that the minimum number of people have timing conflicts).
If you need Special Consideration or want to know the specific rules around it, please see UNSW's Special Consideration page . If your issue is minor, you can contact your tutor about it and they may be able to help you even if your situation doesn't warrant a full Special Consideration claim.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 teaching staff)
Hello COMP1511!
We're returning to our normal routine of Lectures and Tutorial/Labs this week after the Felxibility week.
If you're interested in some other content that was created for you in Flexibility Week, we had some guest lectures and live streams that are available in our Lectures Section
Assignment 1 will have finished for most of you now. We hope that you've learnt something interesting in this assignment, even if it's just getting more familiar with arrays! We'll be starting marking soon as well releasing the second assignment at the end of Week 7 after a week's break from assignment work.
Also, a reminder in case anyone hasn't filled it out, we've been surveying the what capability everyone has for working from home (especially for things like VLAB and exams). The survey link is here .
On top of this, we fully understand that while there's a global pandemic happening, people might have issues with how they can approach the course. If you're in any need of assistance, please email us at cs1511@cse.unsw.edu.au . We understand that we're in a time of unexpected changes and that your health and your family should be a top priority for you, so we'll try to help as best as we can if there are any problems.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 subject staff)
Hi COMP1511,
So yesterday rumours were flying around that the assessment for the course might be changing. I believe the School has already sent an email to everyone about this also.
Course Assessment
In light of the fact that we've had reduced capacity for face to face teaching and also that we can't run a proper invigilated exam, the final Grades for COMP1511 will be limited to SY (Satisfactory) or FL (Fail). This reflects the fact that we can't indisputably assess everyone correctly, so we must err on the side of fairness.
We will still be giving everyone a mark out of 100 for COMP1511. This means that while your transcript will only have one piece of information (SY or FL), we will still be giving you complete feedback on how you have performed in the course and an indication of how well you've learnt what we have taught. This number will not be used in WAM calculations, but the School and Faculty have assured us that there will be some kind of measures in place to deal with this issue.
The Exam
The Exam for COMP1511 is also changing. Since we can't run a lab based inviligilated exam like we would usually, we'll be running an exam that you can complete at home. You will be allowed to use whatever resources you wish (open book, or more like open internet), but not to communicate with other students or receive help specific to the questions in the exam. We'll be covering the exam in detail in the later lectures of the course.
This announcement is important because parts of this course are now deviating from the Course Outline that was initially made available to you. We'll be making some changes to the Course Outline shortly.
Marc's Message
On a personal note, I want to apologise to everyone for this situation we're in. Given that I couldn't find a model for final assessment that would, without a doubt, prove that each person's exam was their own and a completely accurate assessment of their capability, I was unable to justify keeping a numbered marking scheme. I fully understand that this is a change that you did not expect to happen to the course when you enrolled, but that the conditions leading to this certainly aren't in my control either. I'm sorry that I couldn't find a way to keep COMP1511 running the way we originally intended.
I hope it makes a difference to you that we were never teaching COMP1511 for the marks we're giving you, but for the skills and knowledge that we think you will need in a Computing Degree or as a Computer Scientist. This hasn't changed! We're going to continue with the rest of the course and deliver it the best we can online and hopefully you will still be excited about what it means to be a Computer Scientist.
If you have any further questions or need help with the way things are changing, please feel free to email us at cs1511@cse.unsw.edu.au .
In light of recent events, COMP1511 is running a survey to identify how able students are to access course resources, and what timezone they're in. This information will be used to help us prepare for the next four weeks of tutorials, and for all our upcoming assessments.
You can submit a response to this survey as many times as you would like - if you need to update your response because your situation has changed, please submit a response again. This survey will remain open until the end of term.
The link is here:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?i...
Hi all,
I have two streams planned for this week:
Wednesday 11am - Professionalism
I'll be live streaming tomorrow at 11am with a talk I give to every COMP1511 class about Professionalism. This time, CSESoc is invited also, so there will probably be a lot of people there!
The reason I give this talk is that there are a lot of things that are very useful to know about but aren't really assessable. I can't, at the scale of COMP1511, assess students on their ability to work in a team and communicate with non-programmers. However, I know for certain that these are (amongst other things) the skills that people are hired for. So I'm devoting this stream to talking about that as well as other things that might be handy, like what kind of attitude might serve you well for learning Computer Science and hoping to make a career out of it.
The link for the stream is here: https://youtu.be/MpzWxMFtFRU
Thursday 4pm - Coding and 1511 five week recap
This stream will be a revision stream of the coding techniques that we've covered in the first five weeks of the course, including a demo using strings and structs. We'll set aside some time in this stream for answering questions as much as we can.
The link for the stream is here: https://youtu.be/oT1fvhMLJbs
Marc
The CSE Student Representatives are surveying student opinion on the assessment of computer science courses in 20T1, and the impacts of moving teaching online. This survey is running on a short timeline - it closes Sunday Midnight. To complete the survey, go to: https://web.cse.unsw.edu.au/~<wbr>apps/prismatic/ . If you have any questions or issues, email stureps@cse.unsw.edu.au .
Hello COMP1511!
I wanted to send a message out to everyone now that we've finished our first week of purely online teaching.
A few points in this message:
Where to find online content
As many of you already know, lectures are being live streamed via
Marc's YouTube Live Channel
. If you can't access YouTube, the lectures will still be uploaded to Echo360 but will be missing things like the live chat.
There are links at the top of the Lectures section that lead to Echo360 as well as YouTube.
Tutorial recordings can be accessed by accessing the COMP1511 Moodle page , navigating to the Blackboard Collaborate link, then, using the menu (three lines in the top left) you can access recordings and look for whichever tutorial you'd like to watch. There will be several to choose between.
Extension of Week 4 Weekly Test
The Week 4 Weekly test was originally due yesterday (Thursday), but we received a lot of reports that people didn't get a chance to complete it while the shift to online teaching was happening and it was also not visible to anyone who wasn't logged into the class website for much of the time it was out.
This Test has been extended so will be due at 5pm Monday, March 23rd.
Week 6 is Flexibility Week
Flexibility Week was introduced by UNSW as a chance for students to recover a little in the middle of the term, so we can take a bit of pressure off and we will not be presenting any new assessable concepts in Week 6. There will be no Tutorials or Labs and there will also not be a Weekly Test released on Thursday 26th March.
Marc will still be Live Streaming. One session will definitely be at 11am on Wednesday, the other is still to be confirmed. There are also some videos from Carroll Morgan, who was going to be guest lecturing alongside Marc in our original plan for Flexibility Week. We will send out more information about these soon.
We will return to our normal lecture schedule with Live Streams in Week 7.
Taking COMP1511 Online
I fully understand that us transferring from face to face teaching to online is not exactly what people would have expected when they started COMP1511. I want to personally thank both the students and the tutors for so quickly taking COMP1511 online and doing everything possible to still make sure we're getting what we can out of this course, even if we're losing out on some of the fun of learning in person. It's been a very difficult transition and not something I would have ever wanted to do without proper preparation and time for course redesign, but worldwide events have pushed us into this situation, so we'll make the best of it.
I hope everyone is still enjoying learning about programming, because it's something that can really teach you a lot about problem solving and creative thinking.
Marc Chee (on behalf of the COMP1511 teaching staff)
As of
today (Tuesday, 17 March)
, all face-to-face Help Sessions will be moving online.
Update
:
There are now instructions on how to connect to our help sessions. You can find them at this link, or on the sidebar of WebCMS under "Help Sessions".
These instructions apply from today (including the help session this evening). If you have questions about accessing them, post on the class forum and we'll try help you as soon as possible.
Hi COMP1511!
As you have now received an email from UNSW that suggests we take all our teaching and learning online, COMP1511 will be doing that immediately, starting tomorrow (Tuesday 17/3/2020). From tomorrow, no COMP1511 classes will be delivered in person on campus at UNSW and will instead be delivered remotely. All students of COMP1511 are recommended not to attend UNSW unless necessary.
Lectures
All lectures will now be delivered via a Live Stream on my
channel
.
There will be no face to face lectures. We will be keeping our current lecture time slots for the live stream and they will be recorded for viewing afterwards, so there is no requirement to take part in the stream at the time it's delivered.
Tutorials and Labs
Your tutorials and labs will be conducted via UNSW's online learning platform called Blackboard Collaborate. For the moment, your tutorials and labs will still be running in the same time slot as usual with your same tutors and there will also be recorded tutorials made available if you can't make the time slot.
There will be no face to face Tutorials or Lab sessions.
You will be receiving an email soon from your tutors that has this similar information to this notice in it. Each tutorial will also have its own separate Blackboard Collaborate session link, which you will use to join the session when it runs in your normal time slot. If you cannot make that time slot and need to attend a different tutorial, please email the tutors
If you have any issues with studying remotely, such as internet connectivity or lack of a computer to use for these sessions, please contact cs1511@cse.unsw.edu.au . We will do our best to make sure everyone can access course content.
Help Sessions
CSE is reorganising Help Sessions to be run remotely. You will receive separate information about how this will be happening (as it covers more courses than COMP1511).
I apologise for any inconvenience caused by this change in our teaching, it has been very sudden for us also and we're doing our best to maintain our standards of education while transferring our teaching online.
Marc Chee (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi COMP1511,
Well, we're into Week 5 . . . getting close to the halfway mark through COMP1511.
Before I talk too much about the subject itself, I need to address the issues we're facing with COVID-19 and potential health or virus spreading risks that are part of running a course with over 700 people in it. UNSW is following warnings and guidellines that are coming from the World Health Organisation, and the Australian Government.
COMP1511 is still running on campus in week 5, but with a few changes:
Practically, what this means is it's possible to cover all work for COMP1511 this week without being physically present at UNSW . I urge anyone who is showing any flu-like symptoms or who regularly comes in contact with anyone who might be immune compromised to please stay at home and make use of our online resources.
For anyone who wishes to attend in person, classes will be staffed as usual, but please make sure to wash your hands regularly, avoid touching your own face and be careful of any shared resources like lab keyboards and lecture desks. Also be careful to cover any coughs or sneezes you need to make. UNSW has made a significant amount of hand sanitiser available as well as our labs having some disinfectant wipes available for cleaning shared keyboards etc. Please make use of these and also notify staff if any of these are missing.
As this situation is changing rapidly, we'll keep you updated with whatever measures UNSW has instructed us to take.
Back to COMP1511
I hope everyone's made a start on the Minesweeper assignment. Remember that there are Help Sessions available through the week if you need help as well as our Course Forum if you need any assistance in understanding or debugging.
Week 6 is Flexibility Week. This means that there are no compulsory scheduled classes in Week 6 . Our plan for week 6 is to still have some non-compulsory lectures that will delivered in person but also be available as videos so no physical attendance is necessary. We are also possibly putting together a lab of challenge exercises (but no marked exercises) that you can attempt if you wish. There will be no face to face tutorials or labs in Week 6 . We will still be running Help Sessions though, so if you want help in the last week of Minesweeper, it will be available.
I hope everyone has a good week and remember, a great way to practice social distancing to limit the spread of a virus is to stay home and write C code :P
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
Hi COMP1511,
Tomorrow (Friday the 13th) from 4-6pm, we'll be hosting a live stream to talk a bit about the Minesweeper assignment. This will be to provide an overview of what the assignment means and how to approach it, as well as some info on how it's marked. You can think of it as an online lecture that's optional to attend and will be recorded and available for you to watch afterwards.
The link to the stream itself is in our Live Streaming section or here .
If we get time, we will probably have a chance to answer questions and talk about pointers, which we started on this week in Lectures.
Hi there COMP1511!
Last week, I told you that the first assignment would be a blast . . . I wasn't joking. We've just released your Assignment 1, Minesweeper. This assignment is based on the old game that used to package with Windows and it will give you a chance to put your knowledge of Arrays into practice (alongside all the fun stuff like looping and if statements etc etc). There's also opportunities to earn marks by using Functions as well :)
Check out the Assignment Specification Document here: https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs1511/20T1/assignments/ass1/index.html or in the Assignments section of the Course Website. Don't worry if there are parts of the Assignment spec that aren't 100% clear yet, we'll be spending a lot of this week covering techniques and topics that make sense for the assignment. This will include tutorial and lab questions as well as a Live Stream (probably Thursday or Friday, but I'll announce that closer to the time).
As a friendly reminder, I hope everyone's had a chance to try the first Weekly Test or is planning to in the next few days. These should give you a solid idea of what some of the exam questions will be like and what it's like coding in an environment without external help.
This week, we're going to continue our learning on Functions and Arrays as well as delving deeper into how we can control and access the memory in our computer with Pointers.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Team)
Hello COMP1511,
Just letting you know that the first Weekly Test is now available via the
Tutorials, Labs, Tests
section of the course website.
In case anyone's forgotten the format for these, this is how they work:
Good luck!
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 teaching staff)
Hi all!
A belated welcome to Week 3 of COMP1511 (some of you have already had your tutorial for this week).
I hope everyone's had a bit of time to settle in now and is getting the hang of programming basics. This week we're going to hopefully use the Tutorials and Labs to reinforce a lot of the ideas about looping that we introduced last week.
Please remember that if you're having any issues and need help, we have a few resources outside of scheduled class time for you to use:
This week
is going to be a busy one! We're having our
first Weekly Test
, which will become available via the
Tutorials, Labs, Tests
section of the course website on Thursday when it comes out. Remember that these tests are there to help you practice for the kind of pressure you may face in an exam as well as give you an idea of where you're up to in the course at the moment.
The next thing is that we'll be releasing the first Assignment at the end of this week (most likely Sunday). It will be a blast. We're still putting the finishing touches on it and testing it before it's released, but it should be an interesting larger challenge for people to take on. It involves everything we're covering in Lectures until the end of this week. We'll also be giving you some support for the assignment in the Tutorials, Labs and a Live Stream session in Week 4.
Happy Programming, you got this!
Marc, on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff
Hello all and welcome to Week 2 of COMP1511!
I hope everyone has had a chance to get set up with programming in the Week 1 Tutorials and Labs as well as had a look at the Course Forum . If anything from the first week is seeming a bit confusing, don't hesitate to ask us for more info on the forum!
If you're interested in the code example that I didn't get to finish on Wednesday, I've made a video, which is available on my YouTube Channel . The code itself is also available in the Lectures section of the course website
This week, we'll be continuing work on our first steps into programming, with a focus on approaches to problem solving as well as adding in Looping code.
In Tutorials and Labs, we'll be working on things like variables, relational operators and building if/else statements. The documentation for Tutorials and Labs is available already for Week 2 in the Tutorials, Labs, Tests section of the course website.
Marc (on behalf of the COMP1511 Teaching Staff)
CSESoc is the student society that represents anyone enrolled in a Computing Degree or course. We host events to improve your technical skills; to improve your career skills; and to help you enjoy uni and find friends. All of our information is best found by joining our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/csesoc/
We have some particularly important events coming up that you should know about. These include:
First Year Camp (6-8th March):
Lab 0 (Today 2pm):
Weekly BBQs (Every Thursday, 12-2pm):
Hi COMP1511,
I'm writing mostly to our unfortunate students who have been caught in the current travel ban. I'm very sorry that we've had to start term without you!
We're currently recording Lectures and Tutorials as well as having all our content available via the course website , however this course is not intended for online delivery and we'll only be able to keep this up for the first two weeks.
If you can get to UNSW by the 28th Feb and have been able to keep up with the first two weeks of recorded content and laboratory work, we will happily welcome you into the course in term 1.
If you can't attend classes in person by week 3 (the week after the 28th Feb), you will need to change your enrolment to take COMP1511 in term 2. There are some FAQs available at the UNSW Nucleus in case you need more information or help re-enrolling https://www.unsw.edu.au/faqs-coronavirus
You should have received an email from your tutor, and if not, you can find their contact details via the timetable section of the course website. If you need any assistance with tutorial or laboratory work, please contact them.
We're very sorry that for some of you, this means you will not be able to join us for COMP1511 this term, but the course will be available in both terms 2 and 3 this year, so we hope to see you then!
Hi there,
A friendly hello from your lecturer for COMP1511, Programming Fundamentals.
My name's Marc Chee and I (along with Andrew Taylor and the other awesome subject staff) will be taking you through COMP1511 in Term 1 this year, which starts VERY SOON! (excitement intensifies)
We're still cobbling together all the pieces that make the course run, but we're confident it'll mostly be ready by the time you get here :P For now, you can check out the
Course Outline
on the
Course Website
which has an overview of how the course runs. There's not much else on the website yet, but we'll be populating it with information as the term progresses.
Parts of the course (Lectures, Tutorials and Labs) start in week 1 (starting 17th February), which means some of you will have Tutorials and Labs before the first lecture. Your tutors will walk you through getting started and there's no need to have seen the first lecture to be able to take part in the first tutorial and lab.
Hope to meet you all soon and looking forward to discovering the joys of programming together!
Marc
Coronavirus Information
There is obviously a lot of concern about the current coronavirus problems. We will be running the course in its normal timing, but we'll be providing some extra online resources for anyone who is unable to attend the first two weeks in person due to travel restrictions or self isolation.
If you'd like to know more about UNSW's response to the virus, they've released a FAQ here .