Happy Holidays (+ Addressing Feedback)

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Friday 24 December 2021, 10:38:30 PM.

Hi everyone,

This notice does not contain any critical information and is not required to be read.

Happy Holidays / Merry Christmas for tomorrow! This is a very delayed final notice for the course that I've been meaning to send out.

I wanted to first say thank you to our 800~ students for being such a great bunch of students this term. It was honestly a pleasure to watch so many of you learn and grow. It's the reason I kept coming back to teach this course - watching people like yourselves "level up" (professionally, technically, and more) in such a short amount of time.

I also wanted to say a massive thank you to the teaching staff for 21T3. Jake, Emily, Nick, and our 30 wonderful tutors. I don't exaggerate when I say that on the whole I think the balance of experience, professionalism, and commitment to teaching that your tutors show is really some of the best UNSW has to offer. I hope you all take the time to reach out and stay in touch - they're all great people and they speak so highly of everyone here.

The primary reason for this notice though is to address feedback from MyExperience. I think it's important that for every course offering the time is spent to demonstrate that we've read the feedback and that in many cases we're intending to do something about it.

To those who had a rough time in COMP1531, all I can say is that I'm sorry that it happened. Whilst every term it seems like we reduce the number of people that receive bad luck, there is always a small group of people who just have it rough. We'll try and do better.

The short story is that in response to your feedback we intend to: pushing CSE to stabilise the gitlab runners; overhahuling the tutorials & labs (including lab marking); providing more resources for students in areas that are lacking; providing more feedback; doing our best to further support challenging groups (both in formation and ongoing battles).

The more detailed comments are below

Things that we're planning to improve based on feedback

• Providing more guidance and frameworks for resolution for groups with challenging team members
• Pushing CSE to improvement the gitlab runner infrastructure so things are both more reliable and faster
• Making some improvements to how groups are formed to make things a little bit fairer across the course
• Fundamentally rethinking how we do our tutorials and labs, both in terms of content but also in terms of how we structure the 3 hours, how we mark labs, and more. This includes reducing the amount of manual marking that labs require so that students get more time getting feedback from tutors
• Getting more help on critical topics such as deployment
• Ensuring that feedback for both labs and the project is more thorough and more structured so that you have more of a chance to learn from your work and mistakes
• Reviewing iteration 2 & 3 lengths and weightings.

Things that we'd love to learn more about so we can hopefully action

These are pieces of feedback that we received that are hard to action with more information, since the comments were broad enough that we'd normally ask follow up questions. However, since MyExperience is anonymous these will be hard to do much with unless anyone wants to reach out to share more specifics about how they felt. The items below are paraphrased:

• "Workload was too much": Which particular part of the workload? Would love to hone in on that
• "Can we have more practice exercises": Yes, absolutely! Though it would be good to know where the biggest pitfalls were
• "Spec was too vague to know what it's asking without posting on forum": Would love to know what particular parts felt like they were falling down so wecan learn more
• "Lectures were confusing and disorienting, or weren't informative enough": Similarly would love to know specifically what parts people found could be improved so we can go and look at that

Things that won't be changed or have already been mostly solved

Feedback is paraphrased:

• "If group members don't contribute pull their mark down": We do actually do this currently - reach out to our team if you felt like this didn't happen properly for you
• "Remove the group project": I appreciate where those desires come from, but group work is an important part of computing education. We're interested in the question how can we do groupwork well , but aren't interested in the question should be expose students to groupwor k .
• "Project outline was too long": We get what you mean, but the project spec being long and dense is actually part of the learning outcomes in terms of interpreting a set of requirements and implementing them.
• "Have less automarking": Automarking is great because it's scalable and it's often more fair. We had processes in place to help groups who had critical issues (e.g. we re-ran your work). If you have specific worries about automarking reach out to the team! We never want any students screwed over by a small mistake.
• "Have more iterations but make them smaller": Probably not feasible, iterations carry a fairly high overhead and it would most likely stress both students and tutors out more. Nice thinking, though!
  

Things that are challenging to fix, though we'll do our best

These are things that we'd certainly love to fix and will do our best! However, sometimes the story behind the topics are more complicated than they seem. The feedback is paraphrased.

• "More help sessions": We'll do our best, though largely the rough number of help sessions are based on a budget coordinated with CSE
• "Teach content at least a week before we need it": This one is tough. Sometimes the issue is that UNSW timetables tutorials before the lectures in a week. We don't like this and it's hard to restructure the entire course around it. In other instances I know that students don't like learning things in the same week that you use them. We're sympathetic to this, though with trimesters there is only so much we can do too. We will keep doing our best.
• "There is too much work in the course": I think conversations about difficulties of courses are more productive when focusing in on the specifics of where people feel unnecessary difficulty lies. So please feel free to reach out anytime.
  "I don't like participation marks": Yeah, we're not a massive fan either. Problem is that an engaged tutorial is a real cornerstone of having a good online experience + it helps create an environment to meet some learning outcomes. It's fun for everyone once people put camreas on and start participating, but reality is people won't do that unless we incentivise. So it's kind of like free marks in the end. If we think of better ways we'll explore those, though in the meantime we hope you can appreciate the nature of the challenge!
• "Record tutorials": This one is only tough because of all the webcams on. We don't like recording students when they have webcams on. We may consider sometime next year just having a tutor pre-record a tutorial without students or something similar.
• "Don't use zoom": This one is always tough. Different students have different opinions here. We've tried out Teams, Collaborate, Zoom, Hangouts in various courses at various times. We'll continued to be led by what makes the most sense for a course at a specific time, but rest assured we do a lot of research and consultation before making decisions on this stuff!"

Have a great holiday season. I know that for many it's been a chance to reunite with family or loves ones that is long overdue. For others it's no doubt still a time of stress or a time where you are still unable to be doing the things you want or be with the people that matter to you. For anyone who struggles through this holiday season we'll be thinking of you and hoping for the best.

Stay safe & always do your best to look after each other :)

Congrats on making it through the exam

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Wednesday 01 December 2021, 08:47:02 AM.

Hi everyone!

(I thought I hit send on a notice on Saturday but it appears I must have closed the tab, so sending a replacement one now)

We just wanted to say a big congratulations to everyone for making it through the final exam on Friday. A quick look at the results is a reminder of how much so many of you have learned this term. Whether your own learning lived up to your expectations or not, I hope that you all reflect what a transformation you've undergone in the last few months. A week ago some of your tutors were telling me how great it has been watching how much you've all picked up and how much you've learned!

In terms of the final exam, we're still undergoing some marking for it. We aren't releasing results prior to the final release date, so your final COMP1531 mark will be available to you when the official UNSW results come out. From this it will be very easy for you to tell what exam mark you got based on a basic subtraction.

We hope the rest of your exams are going well and that you get a nice break over Christmas. I know it's been a hard term for some of you so I'm sure it will be a much needed chance to recharge.

If you want to stay in touch connect with me on on LinkedIn. If you're interested in the startup space at UNSW or want to see more of the work I'm doing or get some free things when signing up shoot me an email anytime. One way or another, I might see you around in another UNSW course :)

Finally, there is a brilliant bunch of students in Sydney, including a COMP1531 student, who are helping bridge the gap between education and industry . I found out about them because I'm featuring in one of their live streams on December 11th . If it's not something like this, there is always so much cool stuff happening in our industry. Always keep your eyes peeled and don't be afraid to spend the 30 minutes a week just digging around social networks and the internet looking for cool things going on.

Have a great week, and we'll see you around!

Exam + Mark wrapup

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 23 November 2021, 08:26:49 PM.

Hi everyone,

Some updates below about marks and the exam. Please be aware that all marks are tentative. Sometimes clerical/technical errors exist that require marks to be corrected, and sometimes new information is brought to light which may result in a mark update.

Also, thank you to the 55% of people who have completed MyExperience so far. You are all awesome.

Iteration 3 + Overall project mark

Your final project marks are now available on the grades page .

• iteration3 : Your iteration3 mark out of 110 (including the bonus marks).
• project : Your overall project mark out of 50.

There are a couple of classes whose tutors are still marking - but in these cases your tutor should have already emailed you letting you know about this. If you feel there has been a mistake with your mark please reach out to your tutor, too!

Tutorial mark + Class mark

Your final tutorial/lab marks are now available on the grades page .

• participation : Your tutorial attendance and participation mark out of 8
• class_mark : Your lab + tutorial marks combined capped at 15.

If there have been any mistakes please email your tutor or lab assistant.

Marks required to pass exam

If the sum of your project mark and class mark is 50 or higher, then you have already passed the course. If it isn't, then you can tell how many marks (/35) you need to score in the exam to pass the course.

Preparing for the exam

We've covered everything in terms of exam preparation. Expect to receive an email from me by 2pm on Friday outlining information about starting the exam. The email will be sent to your student email as well as posted as a pinned post on the ed forum.

I have just sent a test email to you tonight that you should have received - this is the email address we will email exam info on to you throughout the exam.

Have a great week! See you Friday afternoon.

🌷 End of week 10 updates, MyExperience

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 20 November 2021, 03:42:44 PM.

Hi everyone!

We hope you've had a bit more of a relaxing week 10, especially after your project was due on Monday.

No big updates this week besides a reminder about MyExperience! I will send a notice again on most likely Tuesday with information about your iteration marks, final project marks, and some reminders about the final exam.

Nothing else for you to do this term except prepare for the final exam. If you haven't already seen it, check out the exam lecture, which covered a lot of points about the final exam .

MyExperience

Thank you so much to the 45% students who have filled out the MyExperience survey! More than 1 out of 2 students still haven't filled it in, though. 😢 If you haven't filled it in, take the time to fill it in by clicking here !

Thanks you so much!

🙉 End of week 9 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 13 November 2021, 05:39:09 PM.

Hi everyone!

We have our final week major week upon us next week! Very excited for things to start to wrap up soon. I'm sure you're all very tired and I'm glad that we're wrapping up an exciting term, particularly when we've seen so many students learn so much.

MyExperience

Filling out MyExperience is one of the most helpful things you can do for the teaching team here in COMP1531. It would really mean a lot if you could just take 5 minutes to fill it in. The information is extremely useful for us in understanding how we're doing and where we need to focus attention.

Click here to fill it in!

Iteration 3 Due & Peer Review

Iteration 3 is due 10am Monday morning (week 10). Good luck on your last leg - once this part is done you've wrapped up what is probably your longest assessment any of you have done so far at uni. It's really incredible thinking about how far so many people have come!

Peer review for iteration 3 will be open from 10am 15th November -> 10am 18th November (Monday to Thursday)

THE LINKS WILL NOW BE FOUND ON THIS PAGE. Check back on Monday morning.

Please remember that it's a requirement to complete the peer review.

Exam & Sample Exam Info

Information about your final exam for COMP1531 can be found here . This page also includes links to a sample exam

Week 10 Lectures

Week 10 has our last two lectures in it:

• Wednesday : (Bonus) Python Iterators & Generators - this is not assessable and is optional. It will be taken by Nick (tutor)!
• Thursday : Final Exam - we will brief and discuss the final exam together
  • If there is time remaining we'll do another bonus lecture

Other notes

• lab09_history may have an unmerged merge request in your repo. It was pushed out in the middle of week 9. We're not sure why it didn't merge in automatically, but do merge that in if you're doing that lab!
• I don't think it's going to be possible to run an in-person lecture this year sadly! It was something I was really hoping to do as I'd love a chance to meet many of you. My plan will instead be to run a lecture in-person (like a guest lecture about some random topic) in T1 of 2022 and invite you all along if you wanted to come! But obviously that is months away.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend :) Nearly there.

🦄 End of week 8 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 06 November 2021, 12:26:06 PM.

Hi everyone!

Nothing major in the way of updates this week - we're just going through the term on cruise control at the moment. The main update to share this week is on Iteration 2 marks.

Iteration 2 Marks

Iteration 2 marks are now available. You will be able to find your grade on the grades page . In one or two cases your mark released may be delayed and come up as 0, in which case your tutor should reach out about that delay if they haven't already.

This iteration 2 grade is a combination of your automarking marks, manual marks, and individual contributions (where applicable if contributions were uneven). Your tutor should have already provided you with written or verbal feedback for iteration 2. If any feedback was missing, feel free to reach out to them.

Please note: iteration marks are subject to change if new information is made available throughout the course about your group dynamic (where evidence can be provided) that was not previously known to your tutor.

Scholarship opportunity for women

Jake has found and passed on a great opportunity available to women who are enrolled full time in a computing bachelor degree (along with some other criteria you should check out). You can read more about it here . This is not something we're affiliated with, but rather just an opportunity being passed on. If you need any moral support, have doubts, or want us to help look at any resumes, do feel free to reach out to either or both of us (hayden.smith@unsw.edu.au, jake.renzella@unsw.edu.au).

The deadline to apply is December 10th this year.

Week 9

Week 9 is business as usual. The lectures cover content that aren't tied to your project. It's just helpful material about git, material for your exam, and a bonus lecture on web front-end (non-assessable). It's one of those weeks that if you're feeling under the pump you could comfortably loop back to the recordings in week 10 once you wrap up the project.

Regardless, looking forward to seeing you all next week!

See you then :)

Gitlab down 11am-5pm

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Wednesday 03 November 2021, 09:18:17 AM.

Hi everyone,

The school of computer science will be taking Gitlab offline from 11am-5pm today for some relatively urgent security upgrades. Sometimes these things take a bit longer or done a bit quicker than expected, so check back this afternoon.

This does not affect your scheduled classes or class times.

This affects all courses in CSE that use gitlab, so we appreciate your patience!

Thanks

🌻 End of week 7 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Friday 29 October 2021, 11:18:10 PM, last modified Sunday 31 October 2021, 09:14:35 PM.

Hi everyone,

I hope you had a good week - your tutors have said some good things about the project demonstrations they've seen. They've told me how impressed they are in general with what you've accomplished this term. Keep up the great work!

Not many updates for you this week!

We expect your iteration 2 final mark to be released next Friday (1 week from today).

Lectures from here on-in will feel a little bit lighter, as besides lecture 8.1 nothing else will really have any serious impact on you completing your project. Next week Jake will take the first hour of the Thursday lecture to do a bonus (non-assessable) lecture on Python Classes. The lecture not being assessable means if you never watch it it will have no direct or indirect impact on your mark.

I am many of you get a chance to focus on yourself, even if briefly, this weekend. Keep your head up, there isn't too much more to go. We'll all get over the finish line together!

Have a good weekend.

❄️ End of week 6 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 23 October 2021, 08:58:28 AM.

Hi everyone!

I hope your flex week has been OK (albeit busy). We've got a couple of days until iteration 2 is due.

PLEASE READ Iteration 2 - Peer Review

Peer review for iteration 2 will be open from 10am 25th October -> 10am 28th October (Monday to Thursday)

This time we will just be using an online form instead of using Moodle (too many complications with Moodle) .

THE LINKS WILL NOW BE FOUND ON THIS PAGE. Check back on Monday morning.

Iteration 2

Iteration 2 is due on Monday week 7 at 10am.

I can see that some students or groups are definitely putting a lot of pressure on yourselves. One of the hardest things to do at university is to balance your ambitions with realities of what you are able and have time to do. Many of you have other commitments like duty of care to family, a job on the side, etc. Maybe you're overloading, or maybe you've been caught up in a personal project that is distracting you from university a little bit.

Your lives are complex, your experiences are complex, and you can't assess your own abilities and output in COMP1531 in a vacuum, otherwise you'll have unrealistic expectations on yourself. So yes, keep pushing hard and test your limits a bit, but we just hope no one benchmarks themselves too heavily against people who probably have different circumstances and technical backgrounds.

So for any of you, whilst your automarks for iteration 2 might be different to what you got in iteration 1 (totally normal given that iteration 1 was largely designed to be very easy), don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with you etc.

General Updates

• Iteration 3 will be pushed to your repo on Monday night (just like we did with iteration 2). We will discuss it in week 7 lectures.
• I think if you get a chance we think it would be useful/helpful to check out the following forum posts:
  • Adding Database to GitIgnore
  • Coverage pipeline broken?
  • Difference between GET and POST when making requests
  • Rebase conflicts
    • This one in particular is interesting because it talks about how you can setup git differently to make git pull's less difficult if there are merge conflicts

Informal Hangout

I've been running a monthly informal hangout where I invite students in courses I am involved with to come and hangout to chat for an hour on the last Thursday of every month. It's just a zoom call with no agenda other than to breakup the monotony people have felt during COVID.

The next one is 8pm-9pm on Thursday the 28th October (week 7).

Zoom link: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/89858064658

If you want to come say hi, ask me any questions, have me ask you questions, talk about CSE, degrees, or really anything random. Anyone is welcome, including people who aren't doing this course.

We'll see you all on Wednesday!

🎩 End of week 5 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 16 October 2021, 11:58:40 AM, last modified Tuesday 19 October 2021, 10:53:52 PM.

Hey everyone! Flex week is next week. Very exciting to catch a break from class. See updates below!

Iteration 1 Marks

Iteration 1 marks will be made available later today at 10pm today (16th October). You will be able to find your grade on the grades page .

The only exception to your marks being released tonight is if your tutor has emailed you already telling you about a marking delay for your class. If that is the case, they will notify you when you will receive your marks.

This iteration 1 grade will be a combination of your automarking marks, manual marks, and individual contributions (where applicable if contributions were uneven). Your tutor should have already provided you with written or verbal feedback for iteration 1. If any feedback was missing, feel free to reach out to them.

Please note: iteration marks are subject to change if new information is made available throughout the course about your group dynamic (where evidence can be provided) that was not previously known to your tutor.

Attendance / Participation mid-term update

We have just released an interim participation mark on the grades page called "participation_first4weeks". This is your mark for tutes 1-4 inclusive, and is out of 4.

Remember that if your interim mark is 2.5/4, you are still able to get full marks for the class mark if you are scoring full marks in each lab.

If you have an email from me or special consideration confirming that you have a pending mark estimate due to missed tutorial, this will not be reflected in this mark as it is applied at the end of term.

If you believe there has been a clerical error in your mark, please email your tutor :)

In week 10 we will release the full participation mark for the remaining tutorials 5, 7, 8, 9 (tut10 is a revision tutorial and is not counted).

Iteration 2

Iteration 2 is due in 9 days (25th October). Make sure you aren't pushing at the last minute, and don't forget to submit via the command line (1531 submit iteration2 [group]).

The leaderboard will be run during week 6 on Tuesday late morning, Thursday late morning, and Saturday late morning. We will not run it more than those 3 times, so use those opportunities strategically to get a sense of how you're going.

Week 4 lectures were certainly quite a lot to take in. Some questions arose on the forum about different types of requests, and how we handle them, so we'll summarise them again below:

• GET:
  • Input comes in via request.args.get('X') , which pulls data from the URL query string
  • Output is returned as a JSON dump of dictionary ( json.dumps(Y) ) which sends it via the body of the response
• POST, PUT, DELETE
  • Input comes in via the body as JSON, which is captured into a python dictionary with request.get_json()
  • Output is returned as a JSON dump of dictionary ( json.dumps(Y) ) which sends it via the body of the response

Don't doubt yourself too much on the flask stuff either. Remember that if you're in doubt, you can just try running your code against the dry runs provided for iteration 2. You will only pass the dryruns if you've understood the above correctly, so it's a good sanity check.

Next week + help sessions

Week 6 is flex week! That means we have no lectures, no tutorials, and no labs!

(by Eliza Lee)

During week 6, we are putting on 15 extra person-hours worth of help sessions to provide assistance to you in the lead up to iteration 2 being due. Keep an eye on the help sessions page!

On Monday we will be releasing the remaining tutorials and labs for weeks 9-10.

Other than that, we'll see everyone in 2 weeks! Week 7 is a week on software requirements so it should be a nice break after a fairly hefty week of coding.

Have a great week, and we'll all be here to support you.

🌷 End of week 4 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 10 October 2021, 07:54:27 PM.

Hi everyone!

Some updates for you to wrap up week 4 :)

Iteration 1

Congratulations to everyone again for the stellar iteration 1 automarks. Your tutors are currently doing the rest of the marking and any necessary individual adjustments.

• How do I find my final automark result?
  • Just checkout the leaderboard. We ran it again shortly after it was due. So the leaderboard reflects your final iter1 automark.
• How can I see why I got those marks?
  • We have pushed two text files to a branch on your group repo called " iter1-results "
  • This is the pytest output that has come from running both your tests and our tests against your implementation.
  • The names of the tests and the errors should be indicators to you as to what you've done wrong.
• When will I get my final iteration 1 mark?
• We're intending to release your iteration 1 mark late on Friday night of week 5 (15th October). This will be a single mark that takes into account the automark, manual mark, and any adjustments if individual contributions were notably unequal.
• You can also expect feedback on the manual marking part of iteration 1 if you haven't already received it. Ask your tutor this week if necessary :)

Iteration 2

Iteration 2 was released on Monday evening of week 4.

The lectures in week 4 were extensive in covering most of the core content you need to get going with iteration 2.

Iteration 2 is a fairly big iteration, so make sure you get started (if you haven't already). Due to the increased size and difficulty, it's important to go into it too knowing that your group may not perform as well in iteration 2 as iteration 1. So aim high, but don't stress yourself out trying to get it perfect (as most people won't get it perfect).

Remember that for iteration 2 we're focusing only on HTTP tests . You can reuse all of your tests from iteration 1, though you'll meed to either wrap or modify these tests so that its testing your server by making HTTP requests. This is exactly what we've been demonstrating in lectures in week 4.

Week 4 & 5 Lectures

An update: during the iteration 2 intro lecture, I was getting 500 errors when testing my server (I was expecting 400 errors). The reason for this was that I was using an old version of Flask on vlab . I installed flask manually instead of installing the version of flask found in the course requirements.txt . If you have similar issues, ensure you're using the right versions of packages.

The week 5 lectures will touch on a couple of last useful topics for iteration 2! We'll be talking about design, persistence, and auth this coming week. Jake will be taking the auth lecture.

Some students were asking about notifications when lectures have been snipped and uploaded. The easiest way to get notifications about new lectures being uploaded is just to subscribe to the YouTube channel most of the lectures are on .

Other than that, we hope you've had a good week :) Only 1 more week until your flex week!

To our Sydney friends, enjoy the extra freedoms tomorrow. For anyone in Victoria, we'll be thinking of you and hoping you're well. And just generally to any else out there whether in Australia or not, we hope you're keeping your chin up and managing things OK. A lot of better days on the horizon in the coming months.

✈️ End of week 3 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 02 October 2021, 09:24:47 PM.

Hi everyone!

We hope you've had a good week :) Some updates below!

Iteration 1 Due Monday

• Iteration 1 is due at 10am on Monday the 4th of October . We don't accept late submissions (we have automarking to run!)
• You can view the tests that we are using as part of the dryrun by running the following command on a CSE terminal: " cat ~cs1531/bin/iter1_test.py ". This will print to the terminal the file that contains the pytests we use for the dryrun. Please remember the dry run is not the leaderboard (read the spec again if confused).
• Good luck! Keep up the great work.

Iteration 1 Peer Review

• As part of iteration 1, you're required to complete a peer review of your team members. The review will be open for 48 hours between 10am Monday 4th October, and 10am Wednesday 6th October. Mark penalties may apply if you do not fill it in.
• To access the peer review once it's open, log into Moodle and access the COMP1531 page. Then click on Iteration 1 Peer Review .
• This peer reviews, along with your other contributions, will be what your tutor uses to assign your iteration 1 mark (which is sometimes the same for all group members, sometimes different).
  

Iteration 2 Release

• Iteration 2's README + code will be automatically pushed to your group's repo on Monday evening (4th October). Keep an eye out for it!
• Don't worry, this doesn't stop you demonstrating code during your lab in week 4. Your tutor can show you how to go back to a previous commit.

Content Release

• For most of week 4, Jake will be taking the lectures. In particular, Jake will be teaching the topics 4.2 and 4.3 that include HTTP, Flask, and more testing. These are all critical topics for iteration 2.
• Lecture 4.1 (Data Transfer) is important to watch before the week 4 lectures. This will be pre-recorded and released by Monday!
• Week 7 & 8 tutorial and lab will be released on Monday, too.

Have a good weekend! We'll see you all next week!

✈️✈️

CSESoc Community Discord - passing on a message

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 28 September 2021, 01:11:24 AM.

The following message is from the Computer Science and Engineering society (CSESoc)

CSESoc has a community Discord server with almost 3000 verified members! It's a space for students currently studying or interested in CSE to interact socially and academically despite the difficulties of lockdown. We also have unofficial course chats for most CSE courses so students can meet new people, stay in touch, and discuss with peers!

Some other things we do on the server include:
- Run game nights every 8pm on Fridays.
- Post job opportunities.
- Announce social/career/technical events.
- Give access to our Minecraft server.

Students can join via http://cseso.cc/discord then verify themselves using their zID.

WELLCON - UNSW Arc, passing on a message

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 28 September 2021, 01:10:18 AM.

It’s called WELLCON and is UNSWs first Wellness and Wellbeing Conference! We want to bring together all of our student volunteers, ambassadors, and leaders, as well as those students passionate about mental health and wellbeing to learn from each other and experts in the field. With over 3 hours at WELLCON you will uncover the secrets to caring for yourself, unlock your ability to care for others and workshop the ways we address mental health at uni.

When: October 6 | 3-6PM | Online

What's on the schedule?

· 🌏 Anushka Phal speaking on Culture, Conflict and Mental Health

· 🎓 One Eighty diving deep into The Early 20s Struggles

· 👌 Ash King getting into the nitty gritty of perfectionism

· 🧠 UNSW's own Dr Sue Morris giving a Suboptimal Thinking Masterclass

· 💛 Student Minds to talk Mental Health Literacy @ UNSW

· 🗓️ Arc's Wellness Event Do's and Don'ts

Register: https://arclimited.formstack.com/forms/wellcon Registration is essential, and students that register before September 29 get a free goodie pack delivered to their door! (Unfortunately, this goodie pack can only be sent to students in Australia, but there will be lots of prizes given out at the event that can be won by anyone all over the world.)

🦓 End of week 2 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 25 September 2021, 12:55:44 AM.

Hi everyone!

We hope you've had a great week. Many of your tutors have said good things about how fun class has been.

Some key updates for you:

• Tutorial02 solutions have been released.
• Lab02 solutions will be released on Monday evening (week 3).
• Help sessions ran in week 2, and will continue to run in week 3.
• From 12pm on Wednesday morning (week 3) the leaderboard will be populated with real data that comes from running the code on your master branch against. The automarker will run sometime between 10am-12pm. We'll simply pull your latest code on master sometime in that window (we run groups synchronously, so each group will be run at a slightly different time). Therefore be careful not to merge massive changes into master between 10am-12pm as you might have a different version run than the version you expect to run.

Other items relating to your group project (iteration 1):

• Now that you've seen the week 2 lectures, we expect to see engagement with standups, meetings, task boards, etc from everyone between now and iteration 1 being due.
• Double check your MS Teams channel(s) + Gitlab repo has the correct people in it - contact your tutor if there are any issues.
• Have some fun! Iteration is a light iteration and a chance to learn some core skills.

Next week

• In week 3 we will continue to learn about python, testing, and other critical elements you will need for the rest of the course. Lectures will be released over the weekend (slow release since changes are being made).
  • Thankfully, pretty much nothing that we learn in week 3 is not required to be applied to your iteration 1 - so no need to worry about that! Bunker down on iteration 1.
• I'll see you next Wednesday for the lecture!

Informal online hangout

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 21 September 2021, 02:13:29 PM.

Hi everyone!

If you want to come say hi, ask me any questions, have me ask you questions, talk about CSE, degrees, or really anything random - come and join a call on Thursday open to anyone in our community. Just a chance to chat and catch up amidst everyone being isolated at home. Anyone is welcome.

8pm-9pm Thursday 23rd September

Last time we had about 30~ people there, a bunch of which were chatty and others just wanted to hang out quietly and listen in :)

https://unsw.zoom.us/j/89858064658

🐕 End of week 1 updates

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Saturday 18 September 2021, 06:14:44 PM.

Hi everyone!

Now that we're wrapping up week 1, it's a great time to summarise the key things that happened this week and give you some pointers for week 2.

If you found week 1 a lot to take in, we've got a helpful getting started guide you can find here .

Week 1 recap

The key things that happened in week 1 are:

• Week 1 lecture slides and recordings can be found on this page .
• Week 1 tutorial and lab content links can be found on this page .
  • Week 1 tutorial solutions have been released (always released on Friday night)
  • Week 1 lab solutions will be released shortly after the deadline (checkout the "solutions" branch on the repos)
• Your project groups were formed during class and the project specification was released on Friday night.

Project groups

During your week 1 class your tutor will have finalised your project groups in your lab time.

Your tutor should have also added you to a Microsoft teams channel just for your group. Whilst you aren't required to communicate via the Microsoft teams channel we make for you, it's important to note that if teamwork disputes arise or you make claims about other team members contributions later in the course - the only places we will look to for evidence of how you interact with your group are:

1. The project check-ins and iteration demonstrations
2. Gitlab contributions (code you push)
3. Peer reviews at the end of the iteration
4. Any UNSW emails sent between group members
5. Conversations that occur on Microsoft teams

If we need to analyse group communication, we simply won't be able to look at things like Facebook, Discord, Slack, etc, as these are out of our control and are open to tampering etc that make it unfair to consider reasonable evidence. However, anything in your Microsoft teams chat we'll happily take into account. If you're uncertain about anything here or aren't agreeing in your group how to communicate, talk to your tutor in week 2 and they will help you figure it all out! :)

If you don't have your group sorted, or weren't added to your groups Microsoft teams chat, please email your tutor ASAP.

Project release

As of last night a group project repository was created for each group. The repository is called " project-backend ". You can find your group repository (if you haven't already) on the homepage of gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au . If you can't find your repository, please post on the forum. If you can find the repo, but you're in the wrong group, please email your tutor ASAP.

Please watch the introductory videos from the project specification - they can also be found here and here .

The most important thing to do right now is to start messaging or emailing your group members and to start reading through the project specification. During your class time this week you can sync up about it and start some early planning, and I would strongly encourage you to organise times to meet later this week or early next week. From week 3 onwards we will be expecting groups to follow a more rigid meeting.

Over the coming days, t here may continue to be slight changes to your group primarily due to students potentially dropping the course before census date. This usually has any material impact on less than 5% of groups. Your tutors will always support you and find solutions that will make things OK :)

Things to keep an eye on for week 2

• Your week 1 lab exercises are due 5pm on Monday 20th September - no late submissions
• Your week 2 tutorial + lab is critical for you to spend time with your group and tutor to get stuck into the project
• Help Sessions continue to run in week 2.
• Our next lecture is Wednesday morning, where we'll cover more important content for the project :)

Other than that, have a great weekend everyone! Look after yourselves in these uncertain times.

(Correction) Welcome to COMP1531 21T3 🎉🎉🎉

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Sunday 12 September 2021, 03:00:41 PM, last modified Sunday 12 September 2021, 03:56:59 PM.

The previous notice incorrectly said the first lecture is Tuesday 14th September. As per timetable & the lectures page it's Wednesday 15th September.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to COMP1531 21T3 :) The fundamental aim of COMP1531 is help you on your transition from being a solo programmer into being a collaborative software engineer . We have a teaching staff team of about 35 and we're all super excited to get to know you. The term will be over in a flash but we're here to help you through it and have a great time.

Key Points

If you don't lack the time or attention span right now, let us share the most important things:

1. First lecture is Wednesday 15th September 10am-12pm, streamed on YouTube - link will be ON THIS PAGE just before the lecture. We will cover the basics of the course in this lecture.
2. Join our Forum (on EdStem) if you haven't already joined it. Introduce yourself, and ask any questions you have.
3. Pay attention to your tutorial time and location . All online tutorials & labs use Zoom (from our research students find zoom to be the most reliable of a few choices we have). For many of you, your first tutorial will be before the first lecture. Don't worry! That's totally normal and we've planned for that.
4. In terms of notes/coursework, tutorials and labs are already up, though lectures will be made available from tomorrow.

About the course

We would encourage you all to take a moment to read the COURSE OUTLINE , because it highlights virtually everything. We will also go through this a little bit in the first lecture.

In terms of assessment, the course has 3 major components:

• 50% major project (9 week assignment in groups of 4-5)
• 15% class mark (made up about half/half by your lab marks along with tutorial attendance & participation)
• 35% exam (mostly practical, some theoretical)

Major Project Groups

A reminder that preferences for major project groups will close at 8pm on the 13th of September (tomorrow!). You can fill out THIS FORM to preference to be in groups with other people. We don't accept late submissions to the form.

Groups will be finalised and passed onto your tutor on Tuesday morning - they will let you know what group you're in during your first lab session.

On Friday evening this week, we will create a Microsoft Teams chat for your group as well as your project repository where you can complete work. So if you haven't already, we would suggest downloading or logging in to Microsoft Teams .

For other questions about your group, we will talk about this in lectures and tutorials this week.

Please remember - it's extremely normal to be slotted into groups with people you don't know, and things have a very high chance of going fine. And for those that inevitably have some difficulties with groupwork, we've spent a lot of time structuring and designing 1531 to be both supportive and fair.

See you soon!

To those studying remotely or trapped overseas, our aim is to make sure you feel no less connected and involved with things.

We'll see you on Wednesday morning!

🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀

Group Preferences by Major Project - due Mon 8pm, 13th Sep

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 07 September 2021, 11:16:39 AM, last modified Tuesday 07 September 2021, 12:22:21 PM.

Hi everyone!

We will spare you the more formal welcome and information for later in the week - for now we are hoping to leave you mostly alone to enjoy your last week of holidays :)

We do need to talk about one thing early, though!... group preferences.

As specified in the course outline , COMP1531 has a major project component that is a 4-5 person 9 week group project that constitutes 50% of the course assessment.

It's a requirement that your group will consist of only people enrolled in your tute-lab (i.e. you are all enrolled in the same class on MyUNSW - not just at the same time, but in the same class). If classes are already full, we also can't over-enrol you (sorry!).

Because we understand many people do this course with people they know, we want to give you an opportunity to preference who you want to be in a group with . To do that, please fill out the form for each person you want to preference . You must make the preference by Monday 13th September @ 8pm . You can preference 1-4 people. You can also preference no people.

We sadly aren't in a position to accept late preferences, so please fill it in prior to then! Preferences are not guarantees that you will be in a group with those people, however, in nearly all cases we make it work with at least 1 of the preferences.

Click here to fill out the form.

If you don't have anyone to preference, or only have one preference, don't even worry! That's very normal. You might hear murmurs from other students that you could end up with a "horror group" for COMP1531. Believe it or not, about 50% of student's don't provide preferences, and we just randomly match students in the same class.

We can assure you that while groups that struggle do exist, they only make up a small numbers of groups. We have structured the course and assessment very intentionally to have processes in place to ensure that if you work hard and follow the rules, that your accomplishments should reflect your mark, even if you end up with a difficult group .

We'll email you all later in the week :) You can also pop on the forum and say hi too, if you want. Until then, enjoy your week!

- COMP1531 Team