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
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:
Feedback is paraphrased:
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.
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 :)
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!
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.
Your final project marks are now available on the grades page .
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!
Your final tutorial/lab marks are now available on the grades page .
If there have been any mistakes please email your tutor or lab assistant.
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.
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.
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
.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Information about your final exam for COMP1531
can be found here
. This page also includes links to a sample exam
Week 10 has our last two lectures in it:
Enjoy the rest of your weekend :) Nearly there.
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 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.
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 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 :)
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
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.
Hi everyone!
I hope your flex week has been OK (albeit busy). We've got a couple of days until iteration 2 is due.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
We'll see you all on Wednesday!
Hey everyone! Flex week is next week. Very exciting to catch a break from class. See updates below!
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
Hi everyone!
Some updates for you to wrap up week 4 :)
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.
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.
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.
Hi everyone!
We hope you've had a good week :) Some updates below!
Have a good weekend! We'll see you all next week!
✈️✈️
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.
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.)
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:
Other items relating to your group project (iteration 1):
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 :)
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
.
The key things that happened in week 1 are:
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:
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.
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 :)
Other than that, have a great weekend everyone! Look after yourselves in these uncertain times.
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.
If you don't lack the time or attention span right now, let us share the most important things:
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:
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.
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!
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.
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