COMP1531 Notices

Thanks for a great 20T3

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 12 January 2021, 04:58:54 PM.

Hi everyone,

I didn't send this notice toward the end of term because results were released and then UNSW shut down shortly after, and then Christmas was around the corner and didn't want to bother you.

I wanted to take the opportunity to say a big thank you for a wonderful term. COMP1531 in 20T3 was the largest course I've ever had the privilege of running, and my favourite part of being involved in these courses is seeing so many students begin their transition away from being programmers and start becoming comfortable working in proper teams thinking about software engineering holistically. While in the grand scheme of things we don't teach a lot in this course, I hope it's always a place you remember being introduced to some key concepts that will follow you in years to come.

I'd like to congratulate some of our highest achieving students:

• Overall (ranked in order) course mark s:
  • 1) Rory Golledge
  • 2) Eric Holmstrom
  • 3) Liang Qian
  • 4) Jordan Huynh
  • 5) Edward Lu
  • 6) Daniel Wu
  • 7) Lyn Wang
  • 8) Daniel Yu
  • 9) Meixin Yu
  • 10) Patrick Chambers
• Highest performing exam marks:
  • Edward Nguyen-Do
  • Alexander Brown
  • Angeni Bai

I'd also like to thank the great teaching staff (your tutors and lab assistants). I always feel that the COMP1531 teaching staff (as a whole) demonstrate such high levels of software engineering maturity combined with a passion for teaching.

There were a number of very high achieving groups for the project (marks above 98), though I would hesitate to identify any specific selection of groups because I think that it's reasonable that variances in tutors marking between classes are within a range of 1-2~ marks sometimes, and therefore wouldn't feel confident definitively saying that "X" group did the best. I saw the work of many many groups in this course, and have to say that I was genuinely blown away by some of the work people put into the project this term - I hope you all learned something and had a good time doing it.

Have a great 2021 :)

Hayden

Check your email - not using webcms3 for notices

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 01 December 2020, 01:49:32 PM.

Hi everyone,

For the exam, we will not be using Webcms3 notices to communicate. I will instead be emailing you all directly via email for updates. This will prevent any issues if Webcms3 has issues.

An email should have been sent to all currently enrolled COMP1531 students titled "[1531 Exam] TEST TEST TEST".

Please check your inbox (or junk folder) to ensure that you've received this email. If you haven't, please email me directly cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au with your zid.

You will be emailed at 2pm with instructions for the exam.

Reminder: Exam 2pm-6pm on Tuesday the 1st of December

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 30 November 2020, 07:40:24 PM.

Hi everyone,

A reminder that you have an exam tomorrow! 2pm-6pm for most students, with a later finish time for some ELS students. Please take the time to once again read all of the details about the exam prior to it .

Just before 2pm you will all receive an email from me with instructions about where to find the specification for the exam. The instructions will also be posted at the top of the exam page .

The exam tomorrow will feel challenging for some, and long for others - as is the nature of exams like these. The average mark for this course to date is extremely high, so a bit of a challenge isn't a bad thing to help separate out students at the higher end. Please don't be discouraged if you feel like particular questions are beyond your ability, or if you feel that finishing every part of every question in the time provided is not possible. Exams are designed that the majority of students should not feel confident with everything . But like all exams there is plenty of low hanging fruit for even those at the lower end of the course to score handfuls of marks. Just keep your chin up :)

Some final reminders about the exam:

• The exam tomorrow is an individual assessment. Any attempt to communicate with other people (both other students in this course and outside persons) about the contents of this exam on Tuesday the 1st of December will be treated as academic misconduct and may result in you failing this course. This applies to everyone during the exam time. To avoid any doubt about your behaviour during the exam, cease all communication with other students for that time.
• From Wednesday the 2nd of December onward, you are only allowed to discuss the exam with students who have themselves also completed the exam, and it's your responsibility to check if they have.
• Your zpass should not be disclosed to any other person. If you have disclosed your zpass, you should change it immediately.
• Do not place your exam work in any location accessible to any other person. This includes services such as Dropbox and Github.
• If another student in the course makes any sort of contact with you during the exam, or you’re aware of any instances of other students breaching the conditions above, you are required to email cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au with details of the interaction.

P.S. I have also added a mark to your "grades" section called exam_score_to_pass . This tells you exam mark (out of /30) that you need to end up with to pass the course. If your mark for this is 0/30, it means you've already passed the course (congrats!). If your mark for this is 30/30... well - good luck tomorrow! Hopefully this just puts some minds to rest for those feeling stressed tomorrow and seeing you only might need to get a quarter of the exam out OK etc.

Release of tentative marks

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Friday 27 November 2020, 05:44:34 PM.

Hi everyone,

Your marks for a series of things have been tentatively released. You can view them in the grades section .

There are a number of key marks:

• labs (out of 16): Your total lab mark based on how grades correlate to marks based on the course outline .
• participation (out of 8) : Your final participation mark that your tutor has awarded you based on your compliance to participation requires explained in the course outline .
• class mark (out of 20) : min(labs + participation, 20)
• iteration3 (out of 100) : Your iteration3 mark your tutor has awarded you
• project (out of 100) : Your final overall project mark (combination of all 3 iterations, in some cases adjusted based on your contribution

If you are unhappy about your lab or participation mark, but your class mark was 20/20, please do not dispute your marks - because you have no higher to go and it's just a waste of time.

If you think there have been clerical issues with your lab mark please email your lab assistant.

If you think there have been been clerical issues with your participation mark please email your tutor. If you have any questions or disputes about these marks then please email your tutor.

If you think there have been any issues with your iteration3 or final project mark please email your tutor. If you have any questions or disputes about these marks then please email your tutor.

For any disputes raised with your tutor, they will respond to you once with information explaining their rationale, or they will change your mark. If you're unhappy with their response you can forward the email chain to cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au for further escalation.. Any disputes of iteration3, participation, or final project marks may result in your mark going up or down.

I will also be releasing some past exam questions (multiple choice) on this page tomorrow . Keep an eye out.

Other than that, keep studying, make sure you've read the exam page , and I'll reach out to you on Monday afternoon with a reminder before the exam!

Any other questions please post on the forum.

Last MyExperience reminder - Only 33 hours to go

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Wednesday 25 November 2020, 03:18:06 PM.

Hi everyone,

One final reminder to fill out MyExperience - it closes tomorrow night at midnight!

Since my last notice only an extra 3 out of every 20 students have filled it in ... so please fill it in here when you can .

Other than that, I hope you're having a great week and you'll hear more from me on Friday.

:)

Fill out MyExperience ASAP!

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 23 November 2020, 07:16:06 PM.

Hi everyone,

Hope you're enjoying the easier COMP1531 weeks... some quick updates for you.

MyExperience must be filled out right away!!!

!!!CLICK HERE TO COMPLETE THE MYEXPERIENCE SURVEY.

Only 26% people have filled it out :( That means that there are literally 500 !! students who haven't filled it out :( :( Please please fill it out! It has a positive impact for you, me, and our entire community. Even if you just do the ratings and then leave no comments (or dots for comments), that's better than nothing.

It takes a few minutes - so maybe just fill it out as you're reading this email - then you have nothing to remember later!

It would mean a lot :) :) :)

Sample Exam

A sample exam has been released and can be found on the exam page .

Lab10

Lab10 access has been revoked for most students who didn't apply for special consideration while we auto-mark it. We will provide access later in the week (Thursday/Friday) so you can use it to practice for the exam if you'd like.

Mark Checks

Later in the week, probably Friday afternoon, we will release a bunch of marks and give you a chance to make sure there aren't any clerical errors. I will send a notice about it. These marks will include:

• Iteration 3 marks
• Overall project marks (which will have your individual contribution weighted as part of the calculation - though in the majority of cases every team member receives the same mark)
• All lab marks
• Your finalised attendance/participation mark for tutorials

Until then sit tight.

Other than that - I hope you all have an OK week and are looking after yourselves :) Gonna be a sad week without a COMP1531 lecture.

Welcome to Week 10!

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 16 November 2020, 11:01:32 PM.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to week 10! And congrats for submitting your iteration 3 on the weekend. Very exciting that you've submitted two thirds of your assessments this term. Some updates for this week!

Project Peer Review - due in less than 4 days!

Now that your project is over, it's time for you to do your peer assessment of people in your group. This involves a short survey where you answer some easy questions about people in your group. You can find this on moodle (see below).

We will use these surveys to make potential adjustments to students' individual contributions to the project, which may affect the final project mark.

The due date for completing this is Friday 5pm on the 20th of November (4 days away!!)

MyExperience survey ready for you to answer

MyExperience surveys are ready to be completed! Please take the time to fill them in (please pleas please). If you love us or you hate us, we want to hear about it! It's useful to hear what you (maybe) liked and (maybe) didn't like about the course, so that we can always look to improve things going forward. If anyone wants to have more in-depth conversations about course improvements you can always just email me, too!

The link to MyExperience can be found on Moodle (see screenshot above), or you can navigate to the site directly .

Trail of marks

Your marks for iteration 3, including your final overall mark (that takes into account your individual contribution) will be released to you sometime in week 11 (likely toward the end of the week). We will discuss the individual contribution component more in the lecture tomorrow.

Your final attendance & participation marks will be provided at a similar time as your other marks in week 11 - so stay tuned for those as well.

Please ensure that you have checked all of your lab marks (excluding lab09 and lab10) have been correctly added in Webcms3, and talk to your lab assist this week if any of that is not the case.

Final week of content

Week 10 is our last week of content. One more tute & lab to go! Of course, this week during project check-ins will have your final project demo.

We'll be talking about the exam on Wednesday in the lecture, and I'm trying to put together some other interesting lectures for week 10 - things that won't be on your exam. Stay tuned, and I'll see you tomorrow!

Welcome to Week 9

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 09 November 2020, 11:47:44 PM, last modified Monday 09 November 2020, 11:59:06 PM.

Hello! Welcome to week 9 everyone :)

Check your marks for lab01-lab05

Please check your marks on Webcms3 for your labs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If your lab mark has been awarded to you incorrectly, or it hasn't been rewarded to you at all, you MUST start the conversation about this via email with a teaching staff member no later than 10pm Friday 13th November . We will not be adjusting any previous lab marks past this date - so it's up to you to check this now and not in a month.

If there is an issue with your mark, please talk to your lab assist this week during the lab and resolve the matter with them. If there is an issue with that process, you can email me at cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au

Iteration 2 Marks

Iteration 2 marks have been released and are also visible on the grades/marks section of Webcms3. The mark is out of 100.

Your tutor may have provided feedback to your group already, but if they haven't, they will during this week's project check-in.

Please direct all iteration 2 questions to your tutor.

Iteration 3 due end of this week

The final installment of your major project is due at the end of this week! Make sure you use the time effectively this week so you're not submitting late on Sunday.

Good luck to everyone - you've all done exceptionally well with it so far this term :)

See you tomorrow!

Welcome to Week 8

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 02 November 2020, 10:04:45 PM.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to week 8. Only a few weeks of term to go! I have some updates for you.

Final Exam

We've put together some early information to share with you about your final exam . We're likely to add more information this over the coming weeks and discuss it more in lectures, with a final schema of the exam being discussed during a lecture in week 10.

Iteration 2 Marking

Iteration 2 marking is still well underway - with much of the marking done. It's likely that groups will receive their marks sometime between Friday and Monday (depending on how tutors go with marking). It will come in a future notice.

Course Content

This week weeks lecture topics will include some more content on testing, discussing deployment, and a bonus lecture on doing some very basic frontend programming (non-assessable). We will also spend some time covering some common questions students experience in iteration 3.

Week 9 lectures, tutes, and labs are being finalised today to be released at the end of today for you to access by tomorrow.

Feedback from mid-term

Thanks to everyone who filled in the mid-term feedback. I really appreciate the feedback from some students, and it helps us improve the course! One thing I would ask, is that a lot of feedback was quite conceptual (e.g. "content could be taught in a more interesting way"). If you don't mind breaking anonymity, I'm always open to hearing some more specific examples and suggestions that students have. Sadly broad conceptual can be hard to do much with because of how open to interpretation it is - so specifics always help us improve a lot.

See you tomorrow!

Week 7 Updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 26 October 2020, 02:06:19 AM.

Hi everyone,

Quite a few things in this notice, so try and read through them all.

1. Week 7 Lectures

Because of some urgent family matters I have to sort out, we're changing up the week 7 lecture times a little bit:

• Tuesday lecture : Not happening this week (Pre-recorded videos will be posted up on Thursday evening, instead).
• Wednesday lecture : Going on as normal, except time will be 11:30am-1pm instead of 11am-1pm (so we start 30 min late).

2. Iteration 2 due & Iteration 3 released soon

Iteration 2 is due at 8pm today (Monday 26th October). Make sure you and your time leave plenty of room to avoid last minute fixes.

The iteration 3 merge request will be pushed to everyone's repository late this evening / into the early hours of Tuesday. We will then be talking about iteration 3 in the lectures this week.

3. Lab Solutions

For weeks 1-3, we pushed lab solutions directly to your master branch, often in another folder.

For weeks 4 onward, we have/will be pushing a solutions branch to YOUR lab repos. Therefore, once solutions are released, just go to the solutions branch for those! This should reduce any pipeline issues or merging issues that some students were having.

4. Your thoughts on online teaching

I'm collating some data and information on how tutors and students have found the transition to online teaching. It's mostly qualitative feedback and opinions, and I'd love to hear yours! (Because COMP1531 students are the best etc etc).

If you have 5 minutes, it would be great if YOU COULD FILL OUT THIS FORM with some thoughts. Taking the time to share things like this not only helps drive COMP1531 forward, but other CSE courses.

5. 30 Seconds to help someone out

There is a mysterious person who helps out behind the scenes in COMP1531, and his name is Rob (you've no doubt seen him on the forum). Rob is currently a lecturer of a course called COMP1010, and he would love 30 seconds of your time to help him immensely.

COMP1010 (an introductory computing course for non-computing students) is running a large scale Turing test to see if a naive algorithm can generate tweets that sound like Donald Trump's tweets. It would be very much appreciated if you would take part. It's easy to do (you can only spend 30 seconds on it if you want) and it can be entertaining to read the tweets the algorithm comes up with. CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT .

6. Learn more Python - a CSESoc event

At 2pm on Monday November the 2nd, Evan (a COMP1531 teaching staff member) is going to be hosting an online talk and Q&A to get deeper into PYTHON and understand the anatomy of how it works . Evan has specifically put this talk together with COMP1531 at the centre of his mind... so it's really for you!!

While these talks aren't necessary to complete COMP1531, they can really help start to fill all the little "holes" of knowledge you have when it comes to Python. It can reduce the amount of times you go "Ah, it works! But I don't know why."

Event can be found on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/359283105271182

Week 6 Updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 20 October 2020, 12:07:34 AM.

Hey everyone!

Just another few updates for you this week.

Flock expiry - new flock

(This only concerns people who have been using flock to communicate)

So something annoying happened today. All of the flock trials ended. We knew this would happen, and we weren't concerned, but one thing we completely missed (sorry) is that the free flock doesn't let you have private channels. This is quite a pain for most groups. Thankfully those private channels still exist, you just can't post in them any more.

For this reason, I've set up an alternative course-wide flock that ANYONE can join. Simply have you and your team join it, create a private channel, add each other (and optionally your tutor), and carry on there. This can be where you continue chatting for the rest of term.

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THIS FLOCK .

You might be thinking - won't this expire too? Yes, but in 30 days. Your project ends in 27 days. We'll be fine. We don't need a sustainable fix for this as we'll be moving to UNSW's MS Teams from next year onwards, so this unique flock experience can be something that you & your tutors & I are all able to share together forever!

Participation Mark - Weeks 1-4 tentative

Your participation marks for weeks 1-4 have been added to the GRADES SECTION . While the mark is so far out of 8, the marks achievable in weeks 1-4 are only between 0 and 4. So 4/8 is physically the highest possible mark that anyone can get so far.

What did you need to do to get those marks?

• Attending all tutorials gets you about a 1
• Attending all tutorials with webcam gets you about a 1.5 - 2
• Attending all tutorials without webcam, but participating a lot gets you about a 2 - 2.5
• Attending all tutorials with webcam and participation gets you about a 3 - 4

If you feel your mark has a clerical error (e.g. you attended all tutes with webcam and talked a lot, but got 1/8) I would ask that you politely email your tutor and have a quick conversation about it with them. There is always a chance they made a mistake, and if not, I'm sure they can very briefly explain the mark to you if it seems totally out of whack with the ranges described above. Once again, please remember it's flexibility week and your tutors may need the time to reply :) If your tutor does change your mark, it may take a while to be reflected in the system.

Remember that with full lab marks, all you need is 4/8 across the course to get 100% in the class mark. So a 2/10 is really a solid performance so far. The average participation mark across the course so far is 2.2!! Don't stress, it's a small part of a mark with plenty of bonus marks.

If you're confused about the assessment criteria, checkout the course outline again - a lot of detail is written there :)

I also wanted to say an absolute big thank you to everyone for putting webcams on and participating so much. Tutors have reported back to me extensively how great tutorials have been.

Frontend Fixes

We have made some fixes to the frontend repo. They've been pushed - please pull again and re-run. If you get merge conflicts just delete the repo and re-clone it (because most of you wouldn't have modified it). If you haven't toyed with the frontend, you can disregard this part.

Enjoy the rest of the week - will send out more updates later in the week.

End of week 5 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 18 October 2020, 01:58:26 AM.

Hi everyone!

Congrats for making it to the halfway point of the term.

1. Iteration 1 Tentative Marks Released

Your tentative iteration 1 marks have been released, and are accessible on the GRADES page of Webcms3 . You will notice there is two grades that are listed:

1. iteration1: This is your overall mark for iteration 1. 90% of this mark comes from what your tutor awarded you. 10% of this mark comes from us automarking your implementation for iteration 1. This 10% is the the "Performance against automated marking system".
2. iteration1_auto . This mark is a component of your iteration1 mark that we've included for your info. It's expressed as a percentage out of 100. For example, 35% for this part means that for the 10% of iteration 1 mark that was automarked, you got 3.5/10.

Obviously you can calculate the manual marking score that your tutor gave you from this, too. manual mark for iteration 1 = (iteration1) - (iteration1_auto * 0.1).

Before you think about these marks too much, PLEASE READ THIS PAGE .

I've made this as a separate page and not put it directly in the notice as it's likely that another point or two will be added or clarified here over the next day.

2. Lab05 due this week

A reminder that lab05 is due 5pm on the 18th of October (Sunday). We don't want to make anything due in flex week. You will be getting your lab05 marked off in week 7. lab05 during your week 7 lab.

3. Enjoy flex week!

Do your best to try and take even a brief moment to recharge next week. I know there is a lot on and you have iteration 2 due at the start of week 7, but I hope you get a moment to take a breath.

While we don't have any lectures, tutorials, or labs during week 6... WE STILL HAVE HELP SESSIONS. So please check the help session schedule and if you need that help drop in and ask.

Keep looking after one another, and remember the entire teaching staff is always here to help.

End of week 4 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Monday 12 October 2020, 12:14:19 AM.

Hi everyone!

Not much to report for the end of this week.

Gitlab issues

Gitlab is currently experiencing some technical difficulties outside of my control. For those struggling to push to gitlab for lab04 questions, don't worry, since gitlab went down after 5pm, whether you wanted to submit at 5:30pm today or 4:30pm tomorrow, we'll still only count that as a day late (usually means you get knocked down a grade). It will likely be resolved by late tomorrow morning.

Week 5 Lectures

Make sure you watch the week 5 lectures this week (live or recorded). While you don't need to have seen week 5 lectures to complete 90%~ of iteration 2, a couple of the topics are important for getting a couple of aspects of iteration 2 right.

Iteration 1 Marking

At this point we're aiming to get iteration 1 tentative marks to you by the end of this week. More updates will come in the lecture on Wednesday.

Teamwork Advice

Now that we're reaching the middle of the term I think it's a good time to make sure you and your team are communicating effectively. I know that things have been stressful for some groups for a week or two - because it's around this time that group tensions start to rise and disagreements start to fester.

One recommendation I would have is that at your next group meeting, take the time (15-20 minutes) to go around the circle and have each of you tell everyone else in the group 2 things that you think they do really well, and 1 area you think they could improve on to help the group operate better.

Something that is often really important to remember is that there is very rarely such a thing as a "good" or "bad" group-member in an outright sense. We often bring our own unique personalities and traits to any situations, which come with benefits and flaws. Sometimes people are too slow and too careful, and other times people are too fast and break things. That doesn't mean either of those people aren't useful, it just means you have to put them with the right people, and organise the right working structures so that everyone can work their best together. It's all about how pieces fit in, so spend the time making you sure you fit in together as best you can.

See you Tuesday!

Lecture start 11:20am

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Wednesday 07 October 2020, 11:13:20 AM.

Hi everyone!

Some technical issues with youtube & webcms3 this morning have caused a lot of difficulty with the live stream. It's all been fixed a few minutes ago, so the link is accessible on the lectures page,and we will start at 11:20am! The lecture isn't fully 2 hours today so it will finish on time :)

End of week 3 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 04 October 2020, 02:36:55 PM.

Hi everyone!

Iteration 1 due today

I hope your last minute touches to iteration are going OK! If you're feeling overwhelmed or stressed by this iteration, many students feel this way on the first iteration. There is a certain level of difficulty in learning git together, figuring out what you're doing, and then doing it.

Please remember that we will be marking your most recent submission made before or at 8pm tonight . If you push code to master after 8pm, we will just mark the version before that. Manage your time and team effectively to plan around any last minute issues.

In cases where group members have dropped the course or disappeared, and your group is down to 2-3 members, please rest assured that our marking criteria and notes that your tutors take account for this, and we ensure that your iteration is marked with a level of understanding about this fact (groups that had a reasonably lower capacity to do work will be marked less harshly).

Other Updates

Week 5 Tutorial, Lab, and Lectures will be released tomorrow.

Iteration 2 will also be released tomorrow sometime in the evening:

• Keep an eye out for any merge requests that will appear in your group /project-backend repo.
• Keep an eye out for a new repository we'll be pushing to gitlab for your group called /project-frontend .

All the instructions surrounding this will be available in the project-backend repo, iteration 2 section, when it's deployed.

We expect most groups won't start iteration 2 until later in week 5, so don't fret, we're just releasing it early so that you have the information in front of you and can think about it. We're still giving you 3 whole weeks to tackle this part, too!

See you at the lecture on Tuesday!!! Enjoy your public holiday tomorrow.

End of week 2 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 27 September 2020, 03:09:05 AM, last modified Sunday 27 September 2020, 01:30:09 PM.

Hi everyone!

Hope you're having a nice weekend :) I wanted to share some updates this week, mainly about assignment 1.

General

• Week 4 tutorial, lab, and lectures will be released on Monday as scheduled.
• Groups are finalised now. The only group changes will occur due to extreme circumstances, or potentially re-arrangements if many team members from your group between now and the end of week 4 (census date).

Assignment 1

There have been two really important clarifications/minor additions to the specification that you need to pay attention to:

• The addition of a clear() function to the interface that you must implement (see commit 69a79003 and 82d4570f on your commits page). This is a function you were probably going to implement anyway, as at the top of each test function you want to reset the state of the application (i.e. reset your data object that we discussed in lectures to its original state). If you don't reset the state of the application, each subsequent test will just keep "adding data on top of the previous", and it will be a nightmare. The addition of this to the interface is just a formalisation of the function's name/location, which will allow us to properly auto-mark your iteration 1 when it's due.
• Clarification of what owner/admin/member means (see commit c3bcf2eb on your commits page). The short story is that we removed any mention of "admin", and cleared up what owner/member means. You can see the spec clarifications/extra section for full info

While we're on the topic, there are a few things I want to remind you of when it comes to iteration 1:

• Remember that your tests need to be black box tests. This means that the tests don't interact with the implementation at all. If this is conceptually confusing, we've provided an example of this in section 3.3.2. The short story is that the test whether the result of a function call is "valid", you can usually call a different function and pass in those values. I think another really handy tip is that if you EVER directly reference (e.g. data['user'][0]) your underlying data structure (that big data object where everything is stored) in your tests, you're very likely doing something wrong.
• Sometimes some functions can't be tested at all, and some functions are hard to test fully. That's just the nature of black box testing.
• Standard reminder to write tests for a feature before you write the implementation. I could "standard reminder" everyone on a lot of things - but what I would say is don't get so caught up in the programming that you forget the other parts of the marking criteria.

As always if you have any issues or need assistance just post on the forum - we want to make sure you feel supported throughout this term, day in and day out.

Thanks!

We're 20% through the term already and just wanted to say a big thank you for so many people who've been getting stuck into the work and trying to work well with each other. We've still got a lot of weeks to go, but if everyone stays focused like so many did in week 2 then it will be a fun ride until the end of term.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

See you on Tuesday.

End of week 1 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 19 September 2020, 01:27:50 AM.

Hi everyone!

Congratulations on making it through the first week. From online tutorials, to groups swapping around, to using git and python for the first time (for many), it's great to see everyone get so stuck in.

Major Project Release

The major project, including the first iteration, has been released on gitlab. The specification is in the git repo, just like with tutes/labs. We have added yourself and all your group members (according to the spreadsheet) to your group with the appropriate permissions. Your group repository is shared between you, and it's name is in the pattern "fri11orange5" for Fri11, class Orange, team 5.

There are parts of the major project iteration 1 that will make more sense throughout week 2 and into 3, but the majority of it is very digestible right now. My recommendation to every group out there would be to organise a time in the next 3-4 days, before your tutorial next week, to meet up and walk through the specification together. Being on the same page will make starting the project a lot easier during your week 2 lab.

If you can't find your repo, it's likely on your gitlab homepage .

Lab due Sunday & future marking simplification

A reminder that week 1 lab (lab01) is due at 5pm this Sunday (20th September). You don't need to click a submit button, because whatever is on your master branch of your gitlab repo (check on gitlab) is what we will automatically pull and submit for you.

One other change we're making is that labs are now only able to be marked off by your tutor the lab week immediately after the week it's due. Previously we've said you can get lab01 marked off in week 1, and lab02 marked off in week 2, etc. But that has already led to some challenges so we're just going to keep it super simple going forward. If this concept confuses you, here is the breakdown (note we have no labs in weeks 6 & 8):

• lab01 submitted Sunday week 1, marked off in week 2 lab
• lab02 submitted Sunday week 2, marked off in week 3 lab
• lab03 submitted Sunday week 3, marked off in week 4 lab
• lab04 submitted Sunday week 4, marked off in week 5 lab
• lab05 submitted Sunday week 5, marked off in week 7 lab
• lab07 submitted Sunday week 7, marked off in week 9 lab
• lab09 submitted Sunday week 9, marked off in week 10 lab
• lab10 submitted Sunday week 10, this one will be completely automarked

Combining zoom calls

Short story : We're only using one zoom call now for your tute + lab, instead of two.

Long story :

The choice of Zoom > Collaborate was made before term started based on feedback from a number of both tutors and students. Collaborate is perfect for courses like COMP1511, 2521, and a few others, but our needs in 1531 are a bit different. I won't go into that comparison too much more, but always happy to chat about it.

That being said, the main issue we had with zoom when we made the decision makes ago was that only 1 tutor (not 2) were able to control and move between breakout rooms. This is why we split the calls. However we've recently discovered zoom has this capability now, and your lab assist can move freely between breakout rooms. For this reason, there is no need anymore to have separate calls, so we're just one call now instead of two. The schedule has been updated to reflect this.

We're all excited by this! Hope you are too.

Other reminders

• A few students have commented about disliking having multiple repositories per lab. I know it might be frustrating to have to change folders now and again, but the reason this was done is so we can properly introduce continuous integration and pipelines into the course in a seamless fashion. It's a very very exciting addition to the course that we think will outweigh the inconvenience. And if you're still feeling unsettled by it you can invest some time learning about git submodules (something we may cover later in the course).
• There might be a few older places a/round the course you'll see the use of pytest-3 as the command to run to use pytest. I am confirming that using the pytest command without the -3 is the correct method, and we'll ensure everything is consistent with this.
• Keep being awesome etc etc
• I'll see you on Tuesday for our lecture!
• Have a great weekend, ping us on Piazza if you need any help :)

Starting the term!

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 13 September 2020, 12:57:29 AM.

Hi everyone,

I hope your short holidays have been OK! I'm emailing to give you a few quick updates to help you get started in the term :) The tutors and I are very much looking forward to meeting you this week!

Most of the info about the course will be covered in the first part of the first lecture, so I won't make you read too much just yet. There are really only two critical things you need to be aware of this week (because the rest of the details will be shared as part of that).

Lectures

Our first lecture is Tuesday from 1pm-3pm . You can find the link to the live stream on the Lectures schedule page , and you can (later) find the recording + the slides for the lectures schedule page .

I would strongly recommend you watch (live or recording) the first lecture before attending your tute-lab this week :)

Tutorials / Group Allocation

You attend your tutorial/lab at the time described in your UNSW timetable. If your UNSW timetable says "Thursday 1pm-4pm" then that is the time you attend class, and we have to make that happen. It's then up to US for us to organise and allocate:

• Which "stream"/"tutor" of tute-lab you're in at that time (mango, grape, or orange - there are 2-3 classes simultaneously at any time)
• Who is in your "group" for the major project (as everyone in your group has the same tutor/stream)

CLICK HERE to see your specific tutorial/stream allocation and the group you've been assigned to.

Groups are subject to change at any time. If YOUR position in a group changes though, we will notify you directly, promise!

That being said, for some people there will no doubt be errors in this allocation link above due to:

• You changing classes in the last couple of days (which wouldn't be reflected on our info yet)
• You enrolling late (which wouldn't be reflected in our info yet)
• The odd manual handling error (just due to the sheer scale of this course)

Please don't stress! It's gonna be OK. If you are missing from the allocation, or are at the wrong time, or feel there has been some other kind of error, please email me at cs1531@cse.unsw.edu.au . Do not email any other email address for course related matters. Don't email your tutor, just email me at that address, and I'll sort it out.

Please read - Forming groups for 20T3

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 05 September 2020, 09:02:27 PM.

Hi everyone!

tl;dr - please fill this form .

In-person class update

The results are in, and the following classes will tentatively have an in-person class alongside online classes:

• Tuesday 3pm - 6pm
• Thursday 11am - 2pm
• Thursday 1pm - 4pm
• (Still a close maybe, but unlikely) Friday 9am-12pm

All other times will be online only for all classes. I know that isn't what some people wanted, and I'm sorry for that - the reality is we can't run a whole class with only a dozen~ or less people interested in doing it in person.

We will be able to formally confirm the in-person or online nature of each class once we decide on groups next weekend (see below). If you're enrolling after groups have been formed and reading this message, we will look after you, it's just that your preferences may be limited.

Forming groups

As you know, this is a group-work heavy course. Due to the COVID-19 situation and the vast majority of classes being done online, we're going to take a similar approach to some other UNSW courses in pre-forming groups for everyone at the beginning of the course. This will actually lead to a huge benefit of being able to get "stuck-in" to the course in week 1.

However, we don't just want to form groups blindly. We want to give you the opportunity to give us the people that YOU want to be in a group with, by filling in a simple form. We also want to know a tiny bit more about you.

Fill in the form here!

Form submissions are due 11pm on Friday the 11th of September. Everyone is encouraged to fill in this form (many fields are not required), however, only people who either want to attend in-person or who want specific people in their group are REQUIRED to fill in this form.

Submitting the form is no guarantee of being in a particular group, but it will help us do our best.

Talk soon!

We'll send out a more formal welcome message later in the week to say hello and give you a quick run down of the first week! Other than that, keep enjoying your holidays. Looking forward to meeting many of you!

Until then, stay happy :)

- Hayden

[IMPORTANT] Tutorial/Labs: Online V Physical

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Thursday 03 September 2020, 02:46:01 AM.

Hi everyone!

I'll send a more thorough welcome message as we approach term, but in the meantime just a couple of early topics. I will email again on the weekend for update on Online V Physical.

Forum

You've all been invited to the Piazza forum, and you can access it on the sidebar on the left of Webcms3. That is a good place to post questions.

Swapping tutorials

Yes, you have to do the tutorial/lab at the time slot specified in your timetable. Within that time slot (which contain 2-3 classes each) we will allow students to form groups between classes - but only when at the same time slot. If you'd like to change spots, please post on the Piazza forum ASAP!! and ask others if they want to swap (where and to). Hopefully you can find someone to swap with if you need it!

Expression of interest in physical tutorials

If you want to be in-person for your classes, please fill in this form no later than Friday night (Less than 48 hours from now!). After the form closes, we will provide an update of the state of the in-person and online tutorials on the 5th of September.

For context, this is the current state of those expressions of interest:

If we don't get about at least 18 at a given time slot, no physical tutorial will run at that time! So if you haven't filled in the form yet, please do so!