Hi all,
This should (hopefully) be the final announcement you all receive from me from this course. By now most of you should be able to see your final results - hopefully there are not too many unwelcome surprises. If you would like further details about your final exam (e.g. breakdown, feedback), please drop me an email and I will get back to you as soon as I can. If you are concerned about an error/omission, I recommend going down this route first so that we can double check there weren't any technical issues first.
A HUGE shout-out to Raph for all the help he has provided throughout the term - it certainly could not have run without everything you have done.
Thanks to Johannes for stepping in in Week 7 and helping out with the hand over.
Also I'd like to give a big thank you to Adam, Mathieu, JD, and Daniel who helped out with the help sessions, forum and marking
And finally thank you all of you for seeing it through to the end, despite some of the hiccups we had along the way. I really did enjoy teaching this course and I hope to continue to evolve the course based on my own interests and the feedback you provided. Please do get in touch next year if you'd be interested in helping out in any way - tutorials, labs, help sessions.
I will keep the forum open for a few more weeks (it will close during the supp exam), so feel free to keep discussions, memes, whatever going there.
For those of you who enjoyed this foray into the more theoretical side of Computer Science (or those of you who enjoyed my
snacks
teaching) please consider coming along to some of the other courses I run (the numbers for these are always very low): COMP3153 (in T3) and COMP4141 (in T1). At least drop into the first lecture to say hi, grab some food, and see if I can't convince you to stay... [the first lecture of COMP3153 is Monday 9 September, 2pm in O'Shane G05]
Hope to see you all again soon,
Paul
Hi all,
Apologies for not clarifying the TrieOrDie situation earlier.
In line with last year's assessment weighting the TrieOrDie bonus equates to 2% of the final exam (i.e. 2.4 additional marks this year).
If your attempt at the TrieOrDie bonus was successful, then you should now be able to see the relevant flag in the gradebook in moodle. If that flag is "Yes" then an additional 2% was added to your final exam. Please let us know if you believe there has been an omission.
Paul
Inevitably, something slipped through. Ex05 was missed...
... and I forgot the alternative marking for that exercise ...
... but this should all be done now.
Hi all,
After far too much messing around, I can finally announce that the marks for the course (i.e. everything except the exam) have had lateness penalties applied/waived and are now ready to be finalised.
You can see all your marks - including the calculated totals - in the Moodle gradebook: https://moodle.telt.unsw.edu.au/grade/report/user/...
Please double-check the marks (note: these marks may differ from previous versions because of lateness penalties - so you should re-check via give collect) and let me know asap if there is anything amiss. Unless I hear from you, these are the marks that will be submitted in the next couple of days. Corrections can be made even after the results are released - but to reduce any stress the sooner you let me know the better.
Paul
Hi all,
The final exam will shortly be available here: https://moodle.telt.unsw.edu.au/course/view.php?id...
You should be able to see, but not yet start, the exam when you follow the above link.
There are several variations of the final exam, however only one should be available to you. If you have an ELP your version of the exam should have the correct timings (e.g. start/end time, exam duration) as covered by me in an email you should have received a couple of days ago. Please let me know if this is not the case!
Your exam will be automatically submitted at the end of your allocated time. I don't know if I can reopen manually submitted exams, so please don't manually submit unless you are satisfied with what you have completed.
Please review the housekeeping notes I posted here: https://edstem.org/au/courses/16696/discussion/213...
I will be available for questions (via email or ed post) until 10:30. I will try to address them as soon as I can, but apologies if there is any delay.
All the best!
Paul
Hi all,
I've created a version of the 2023 exam in Moodle - so you get an idea of how the final exam will roughly look. Hopefully everything works ok (it might be a couple of hours before I can fix any errors).
The link to the exam can be found on the course website under Sample Exam → 2023 Exam.
Please let me know of any issues via email.
I will try to get a walkthrough of the solutions up later tonight.
Paul
Hey Everyone,
Just a quick heads up that I've released some revision problems in the Practice problems section on the course website. Paul or I will do a walkthrough of these problems sometime throughout the week. Ideally it will be me since I wrote many of the problems and would have fun going through them, but I'm pretty busy with other commitments at the moment so this may not be possible.
Good luck revising, hopefully these are helpful :)
Thanks \ Raph
Hey everyone,
Quiz 7 is now available (in the Activities section on webcms). We have decided that until Sunday 6pm (i.e. tomorrow) you may attempt this quiz and have it potentially count towards your 5 best quiz results (i.e. it will replace your lowest counted grade if you do better in this quiz). After this time, you may use the quiz as practice (i.e. results will be released immediately).
This should be seen as a bonus quiz in the sense that if you're already happy with your quiz marks, you don't really have to pay attention to this (because this only has the potential to replace your current lowest quiz mark). As such, there won't be any extensions available for this quiz.
In other news, you may have noticed that exercise 4 and assignment 1 marks are out, at least in a preliminary form. These should hopefully be useful in terms of feedback since you can get a sense of which autotests were passed and which weren't, but I want to stress that some of the actual calculations are not what they'll be in the final mark. Namely, there were some problems with the wrong late penalties being applied and not all of the extensions from special considerations have been taken into account with these marks. These are currently in the process of being fixed, and exercise 5 marks should be out very soon too.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
A quick reminder in case you missed the announcement: there will be pizzas in tomorrow's lecture (at 12). So if you haven't been to a lecture yet (or for a while), make tomorrow the day you break this habit! Even if you can only come around 12, please feel free to do that and say hi. The rest of the lecture will be Q&A/end of course matters etc.
Paul
PS This is a tradition in my courses - not me trying to butter you up!
Hi all,
Apologies for the delay in this message. I am adding a third option to how the assignments/exercises mark will be calculated:
* Assignments & Exercises equally weighted, best 4 out of 5 (A1/A2/Ex4/Ex5/Ex6) taken.
This means that you can choose to opt out of one of A2/Ex6 if you are happy to take on the marks from the previous assessments.
As with the other options, whichever results in the greatest mark will be what is assigned - you do not have to make a decision on this matter.
We are still working through A1/Ex4 marking issues.
Paul
Hey everyone,
Exercise 6 is now available on webcms (under Activities always). Now, don't panic - as Paul alluded to in a previous post of his, there are plans to make an arrangement which allows students to opt out of one of exercise 6/assignment 2.
Paul will keep you updated with the specifics of this, he's currently looking into the feasibility of various options. I just want to get the spec out there to you all so that whatever happens with this, you can at least view the exercise as soon as possible.
I've put in a due date of Saturday 3rd of August, 6pm. This is somewhat arbitrary and subject to change based on Paul's announcement, it's just to give a rough sense of how long the task is meant to take/around when the task will be due assuming no hiccups.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
The spec for Assignment 2 is now available (and hopefully readable!) here .
The deadline has been moved back to
6pm Monday August 5th
.
In tomorrow's lecture I will go through the key points of the assignment to help reduce the cognitive load and hopefully make it much more straightforward than the first assignment.
Paul
Hey everyone,
Quiz 6 is out now. You know the drill by now, it's due at 6pm, Monday 29th of July and is available under Activities in webcms.
Also, the results are in for the poll about exercise 5 marking structure! Suggestion 1 won in a landslide victory, meaning that now the eight queens question is worth 7 marks, and the RPN calculator question is worth 2 marks. Hopefully this makes the exercise more manageable :)
As for the status of assignment 2, Paul will keep you updated with the specifics but the spec is being worked on now and so should be released quite soon. As for what this means for due dates etc, again Paul will announce this soon so stay tuned for that.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
Just a quick follow-up. The specs for Assignment 2 were inadvertently made available prematurely - these are not currently available, but should be in the next 24 hours.
Paul
Hey everyone,
I've just released the specs for exercise 5 and assignment 2. Exercise 5 is due Friday 26th of July, 6pm and Assignment 2 is due Sunday 4th of August 6pm. Both are available under Activities in webcms. Give/dryrun testing should be working for both of these.
Exercise 5 is about using the list monad to make a solver for the famous eight queens problem, and making a reverse polish notation calculator using the state monad. Assignment 2 is a rather meta assignment where you'll be implementing your own version of the COMP3141 marking script. Currently, marking structure in these specs are the same as the previous iteration of the course's specs. However, this is subject to change.
As you can imagine, with the issues in the course so far, finding the balance between student wellbeing and student learning is quite delicate. We're releasing both of these because we feel it's valuable to have a diversity of assessments. However, we acknowledge that these aren't usual circumstances and that this amount of work being released could be overwhelming. To aid in overcoming this, we'd like to soften the questions somewhat whilst keeping the work required to achieve full marks similar. Some suggestions for doing this in the case of exercise 5 are as follows:
Exercise 5 usually has 3 marks allocated to the eight queens problem and 6 marks allocated to the RPN calculator. We could change the marking allocation in the following ways:
1. Eight queens = 7 marks, RPN calc = 2 marks
2. RPN calc = 7 marks, Eight queens = 2 marks
3. RPN calc task 1 = 6 marks, RPN calc task 2 = 1 mark, Eight queens = 2 marks
These all have their advantages and disadvantages. Things to keep in mind are that the eight queens problem is shorter, but there's less stuff to test (i.e. there's only so many thing you can test about it so allocating a lot of marks to it could mean you could lose quite a few marks by stuffing this part up). I'd like to get peoples' inputs on what they think is the most appropriate thing to do here, so I'm making a poll (alternate suggestions also welcome). You can participate in this poll in the duplicate post of this announcement on the Ed forum #453 .
I can't guarantee that the result of the poll will be the mark allocation decided upon; ultimately, that depends also on how effectively such an allocation will test you on a variety of topics covered in the course and how well this will prepare you for the exam. There is also a possibility that one of the options I've suggested is not a good idea for some reason I haven't considered, and it will be vetoed no matter how popular it is. However, it's likely that something like whatever is chosen will be implemented.
Whether we do something similar (i.e. changing marking structure) for assignment 2 is still up in the air and will be decided in the next few days. We'll keep you updated on that.
Also, good luck for finishing up assignment 1! Sorry to announce more work when you're not even done with that. Hopefully when we're done with these marking rearrangements however, things should feel more manageable.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
Further to Raph's earlier message - I will be at today's lecture to field any questions you may have (and I will go through the two examples I didn't manage to go through last lecture). Food will be provided.
Paul
Hey everyone,
This week's practical lecture is up on Echo360! It can be viewed by following this link: https://echo360.net.au/collection/91c7a10f-16ee-4e...
After clicking this you should be a member of the collection, so you should just be able to see things pop up on the website after clicking the link once. You may notice that this practical lecture comes in two parts; this is because I recorded the first part going over the practice problems with more time left over than expected, but I didn't realise this until a bit after I had stopped the recording. The second part covers some more exercises dealing with the list and state monads, and writing code in a way that works for any monad.
As always, I've put the code from the lecture in the practicals Ed workspace :)
I'm aware that this is a bit of a strange time to release these lectures (I think it's 3am in Sydney or something) but I thought it would be better for these to be out for all of Friday than to try and release them at the exact time the Friday lecture would usually happen.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
I haven't been concentrating on the final weighting of the exercises/assignments. An excellent suggestion from one of you (thank you James) has reminded to take that into consideration. In the interest of consistency, the pre-existing arrangement (Quiz 10%, Exercises 20%, Assignments 20%, Exam 50%) is still an option, however in the interest of rebalancing following the non-assessment of Exercises 1-3, I will also consider a balance of (Quiz 10%, Exercises 10%, Assignments 30%, Exam 50%), and award whichever results in a greater mark (i.e. you do not have to do anything). Please note, that if your final grade is based on the second calculation, the numbers will look a little strange in Astra (effectively some of your "Assignment mark" will be incorporated into your "Exercises mark") - I will try to make it clear in SMS how your final grade is calculated.
Paul
Hi all,
With the waiver of the late penalty for Exercise 4 and Assignment 1, there has been a bit of confusion with regard to adjusted deadlines and additional late penalties etc. As I do not want there to be too much overlap with other assessment items, here is a preliminary arrangement:
* Exercise 4 is due today at 6pm. There will be a 1 hour grace period where no late penalty will apply. All students can submit up to 6pm tomorrow and incur a 25% penalty (after that grace period). Submissions after this time will not be accepted.
* Assignment 1 is due Saturday at 6pm. There will be a 1 hour grace period where no late penalty will apply. All students can submit up to 6pm Sunday and incur a 25% penalty (after that grace period). Submissions after this time will not be accepted.
* Granted SC extensions for up to 3 days apply to the deadline of today/Saturday.
* SC deadlines and standard ELP extensions for more than 3 days will be discussed on a case-by-case basis. Assume for the moment a minimum of 3 days extension.
Paul
Hi all,
Thanks to Adam for arranging additional online help sessions. These will be:
The sessions can be accessed with the details below:
We're hoping to add a regular Wednesday session in the evening, so today's timeslot will likely be a one-off to best handle the Exercise 4 deadline.
Paul
Hey everyone,
Because of how long it's taken to get the give submission tests up and running (they seem to be working now though!), some extensions are in order. First of all, we will be waiving the late penalty for assignment 1, meaning you will now be able to submit assignment 1 without penalty until Saturday the 20th of July 18:00 (i.e. 5 days after the original submission date). We will also be extending the deadline for submission for exercise 4 by 5 days (5 days here was chosen more or less arbitrarily because it's the same amount of time we're extending the assignment for). The new due date for exercise 4 is Wednesday the 17th of July 18:00 .
Right now, quiz 4's deadline will remain as is (Monday the 15th of July, 18:00), but if you feel this needs extending too/this is all too much to do then reach out and we can try and come up with something.
I also want to acknowledge and apologise to you all for the unnecessary stress this has all caused and how it's affected you throughout the term. I especially want to apologise to our ELS students and students with special considerations who have especially been impacted by all this. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to manage special considerations, but please keep reaching out if you require assistance and I'll do my best to pass it on and make sure it's acted upon.
Thanks \ Raph
Hey everyone,
I've just posted the first 3 exercises. They're available under in the Activities section of the webcms page as many things in this course are.
These are not assessed, they're just meant for some practice so you can hone your haskelling skills.
As with the assessed stuff, you will be able to submit these to give, though in this case that's purely for autotesting purposes. However, the give submission is not set up yet as of the time of writing this. I'm not personally handling any of the give stuff so I can't say exactly when that will be up, but I'd say it should be ready within a few of days. When this is up and running there will be an announcement.
I've also made a new Ed workspace called "State exercises". Currently, this has a couple of exercises on the state monad, plus a bit of revision exposition in case that's of interest. In the workspace there are two files, StateExercises.hs and StateExercisesSolved.hs, which are the same file but one of them has the solutions to the exercises filled in. I may add more to this soon if I can think of any more state monad exercises.
Also, I've added some more detailed annotation to the Week4.hs practical file as I often do. I'm mentioning this now even though I do it most weeks because this one is potentially somewhat useful for the exercise, so if you're struggling with that have a look and see if you can glean any inspiration.
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
The specs for the first major assessment items (Assessed Exercises & Assignment 1) are now available on the course website under Activities . I am still working through setting up the give interface, so for the moment submissions will not work, however you should be able to access the necessary code in order to begin both assessment items.
We have decided that the remaining three "Weekly exercises" originally planned (intended to be released earlier) will instead be released as optional assessments - that is, you can attempt them and submit solutions via give as usual (and receive automarked feedback) but they will not contribute to your final grade. We are currently in the process of setting this up.
Paul
Hi everyone,
Quiz 3 is here and is available on the course website under Activities . This quiz assesses content from weeks 4, and is due 6pm on Monday the 8th of July (i.e. Monday week 7). As always, you are encouraged to use Haskell to check/test your answers and you can make multiple submissions. The week 5 practice problems are about to be released as well, so stay tuned for that.
Once I've gotten confirmation that there are no more submissions coming in from students with extensions/special considerations, I'll release your marks for quiz 2 and release another set of answers like those in Ed post #66 .
P.s. Note that I've accidentally set it to be due in flexibility week on Webcms, but Webcms has decided to break my html whenever I try to edit the quiz, so I'll fix the due date on the website during the week (most likely tomorrow).
Thanks \ Raph
Hi all,
A warm welcome to Mathieu and Adam who will be joining the staff to assist with the help sessions (starting today).
I have booked Clavier ( https://studentvip.com.au/unsw/kensington/maps/135073 ) for help sessions at the following times:
It is a small lab (20 computers) - if it transpires that we need more room then I will make further arrangements.
Paul
Hi everyone,
At long last, quiz 2 is here and is available on the course website under Activities . This quiz assesses content from weeks 2 and 3, and is due 6pm on Monday the 24th of June (next Monday) . As always, you are encouraged to use Haskell to check/test your answers and you can make multiple submissions.
If you're interested, the practice problems for weeks 3 and 4 are also now up, though these are not assessed.
Though this quiz is assessing content from multiple weeks due to some organisational hiccups you may have noticed, this quiz is the same length as all the others.
I would like to acknowledge the worries and concerns of a number of students. I know you're all wondering what's happening with the weekly exercises and assignment, and rest-assured your questions and comments are being heard and more information will be released in a timely manner by those coordinating this course.
Even though at this stage I can't be as concrete as I would like to be, I hope at the very least this change in content with the quiz gives you some assurance that you won't have all the work in the course outline dumped on you without adequate time to complete it.
Please don't hesitate to reach out.
Thanks \ Raphael
Hi all,
Because of the way the first quiz was set up, results are now visible and so no extensions are possible.
As you were not advised of this prior to the first quiz, the policy for your quiz grade will be that the best 8 (of 9) quiz marks will contribute to your overall grade (I.e. you get one "free" quiz). Going forward, there will be no extensions available for quizzes. Exercises and Assignments will have late submission options - details TBA.
Students with ELP arrangements may have further adjustments- you will be advised of this soon.
Paul
Hi all,
Just a quick update with this week's material.
Because there was a bit more I wanted to cover in Wednesday's lecture, I will finish it off in the first hour or so of Friday's lecture this week. After that, Raphael will walk through a selection of the Practice Problems which have now been added to the course website. Please note, these problems are not assessed - they are intended to help you work through some of the material covered in lectures. Solutions to these will be posted shortly after the Friday lecture.
The practical exercise for which you will be assessed requires a little bit of setting up, and I will be doing that after tomorrow's lecture, so that the exercise will be released before the weekend.
Finally, I will be making last year's code/notes available (in the ed workspaces) shortly. While I intend to cover (mostly) the same content as Johannes last year, I am new to live coding and there are areas where I could/should be adding more context to the code. Last year's material has more substantial annotation (though out of context, some might not make sense), so it can serve as a secondary resource. Please note, however, conflicting content should be resolved in favour of this year's offering (i.e. what I say applies this year).
Paul
Hi all,
The first quiz is now available on the course website under Activities .
It is due at
6pm on Tuesday June 11 2024
. There will be a bit of an overlap with the second quiz.
You are encouraged to use Haskell to check/test your answers! You can make multiple submissions.
I will be releasing practical exercises soon, though possibly until later tonight. The due date for these will also be adjusted accordingly.
Paul
Hi all,
My apologies, but due to a family emergency there will be a delay on the release of the first quiz and exercise set (and end of lecture recording).
Paul
Hi all,
My apologies, but due to a family emergency there will be a delay on the release of the first quiz and exercise set (and end of lecture recording).
Paul
Hi all,
COMP3141 is currently set up to be livestreamed through echo360. To access the livestream, go to Lecture recordings from the course website and select the current lecture. This stream is what is recorded.
I have enabled chat in ed here . I suggest using this platform to post questions/comments during the lecture as this will be the forum I will monitor during lectures.
Paul
Hi all,
Welcome to COMP3141 Software System Design and Implementation (which shall just be known as COMP3141). This is just a brief announcement to introduce you to various aspects of the course: the website, the learning interfaces, and the staff (for the moment it is me and Raphael).
I encourage you to familiarise yourself with the course website:
https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs3141
as it provides the starting point for all aspects of the course.
Lectures begin today at 11am in Burrows Theatre. Lectures will be livestreamed on echo360 and also recorded, and the recording will be available from the course website shortly after the lecture finishes.
There are no tutorials for this course. I am currently in the process of arranging Help sessions - details of these will be available when I know them.
You will shortly receive an email inviting you to join the course forum on ed. The course forums also provide a platform to ask questions and discuss the course material.
Looking forward to meeting you later today
Paul Hunter
(Lecturer in Charge)