Earning a Grade: If you wish to earn a grade in this course, you must print this Web page and the one on Communications, see tabs on the left, staple the physical pages, sign and date the first page at the top-right, and initial the segments on communication, pair programming, and exams. Your signature acknowledges that you have read and understood all of this page and its special segments. The signed contract is due in class on the day after the first lab.

People:

Instructor:

Jeffrey Palm

Teaching Assistant:

Michael Everett

TAs teach labs, supervise the grading of homework sets, hold office hours, and occasionally substitute in lectures. In general, they are apprentice teachers and are here to learn how to run a course.

Tutors:

Sarah House

Tutors hold office hours and group meetings in colleges and labs, grade homeworks and provide feedback about the class's progress. In general, they are undergraduate and graduate students who know that to learn something really well, you need to teach it.

Class: Class consists of lectures and lab meetings.

Lectures: The course has one lecture section:

Section	Location	Instructor
MWTh 4:35pm-5:40pm	SH 425	Jeffrey Palm

Labs: The course also has lab sections. The labs start on Friday, January 14. You must sign up for a lab section during your first lecture, and you must attend this lab section on a weekly basis. The purpose of labs is to give you some hands-on experience with the actual tools, and to explain some of the principles from lecture with hands-on examples.

Computing Environment: You will do your assignments in DrScheme v208, a programming environment for Scheme. DrScheme is installed on the CCS computers. DrScheme is also freely available on the Web (see tabs on the left). You may install it on your computer at home and work there.

DrScheme runs on most popular platforms (Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X, Linux). Programs written in DrScheme have the same behavior on all platforms. You therefore do not need to worry what kind of machine you use when you run DrScheme.

Assignments: There will be 11 problem sets. The problems are drawn from the book and are supplemented with additional problems. We will grade some but not all problems from each set (picked randomly after the due date).

We will drop the worst homework grade from consideration for the final grade. You may therefore choose to skip one homework set; we'll just assign a zero (0) for this homework.

Due Date: Electronic submissions of your homeworks are (usually) due on Monday at 4:00pm. Most are submitted electronically. You should give yourself 30 minutes to submit the homework because in our experience, the server is overloaded at due time.

Pair Programming: You must work on your problem sets (3 - 11) in pairs. Your partner will be in your lab, and your lab TA will help you find someone.

Pair programming means that you and your partner study the problem sets individually and possibly even sketch out solutions. Then you meet and jointly develop solutions to each problem. One of you--the pilot, and the other one--the co-pilot--looks over the pilot's shoulders. When something isn't clear, it is the co-pilot's responsibility to question the approach. You must switch roles during such a problem solving session. We will practice pair programming in lab.

You are free to collaborate at will with others on the problem sets. If you do so, you must acknowledge all collaborators on your cover page. Failure to do so may result in reductions of your homework grade.

Everyone must be able to solve every homework problem on the due date.

Warning: You must be able to solve every homework problem on your own.

Are you sure you have read the warning?

Exams and Quizzes: We will have two hour evening exams to assess your progress:

• 10 February 2005
• 24 March 2005

Both exams will take place from 6:30-9:30 in Richards 200 (see the campus map).

The exams will test material similar to that assigned in weekly homeworks. You will take the exams by yourself. Collaboration is not tolerated. If you solve every homework problem on your own, the exams will be easy. If not, you will probably have a difficult time with the exams.

To provide some discipline, each lab session with start with a quiz on the preceding homework (or lecture material). If you don't answer the questions on the quiz correctly, you will not get a grade for that week's homework set and you are warned that you're not on track.

Grades: You will get a grade for your homework (factored by the quiz performance) and a grade for your exams. Both must be passing grades; otherwise you cannot pass the course. For the final grade, we will assign a weight of 35% to the homework grade and a weight of 60% to the two exams. The remaining 5% are up to the instructors' whim.