My goal is to maximize student engagement, learning, and enjoyment while also maximizing flexibility.

• Flipped Classroom
  • Starting 2nd week (Sept 12th): course content (slides) will be presented in pre-recorded videos. Students are expected to watch the videos before the lecture it is used in.
  • Lecture will be used for live, in-person explanation and teaching with examples.
  • All pre-recorded videos and live lectures are testable on exams.
• Flexible Weekly Labs
  • You can get help in-person or online during any weekly lab time
  • Can complete labs from home or on campus; all necessary software is free and cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Office hours are held online using Discord for instructor and TAs
  • Instructor is available before class (20m) and after class (~10 min) for in-person questions.
• Assignments have a forgiving late policy.
• Students asking for an academic concession must email Dr. Brian and may be asked to submit SFU Academic Concession Self-Declaration Form

The course has one in-person midterm and one in-person final exam.

• Generating some code to help start solving a problem.
• Provide feedback on what some code does.
• Helping to find bugs.

However, they also make it really easy to not learn how to code! To be a good software developer you need to know how to write the code yourself (with and without the AI tools). For this course, here are the rules:

• You may use any AI tool to help you write code for all assignments and labs.
• If use use an AI tool, you must mention it in your code, such as putting the following comment at the top of your file:
  // Used help from Copilot and ChatGPT to write this code.
• There is no deduction for using AI tools.
• In the end, you must be able to write the code yourself.
• No computers or AI tools are permitted on the midterm or final exam.

Coding practice (assignments and labs) are heavily weighted to encourage everyone to solve problems and learn to code. Since we what to mark what you have learned, marking is based on:

• Labs are marked on completion.
• Assignments are marked as follows:
  • You submit your assignment and it is marked by the TA. This is your "assignment mark".
  • You will then later write a short in-class (hand-written) quiz related to the assignment. This is your "quiz mark".
  • Your final mark for the assignment (called the "assignment credit") is the product of your assignment mark and your quiz mark.
    credit = minimum of ( assignment mark, quiz mark )
  • The "credit" for each assignment is given a weight, such as 5%.
  • The midterm and final exam may also include questions for scaling assignments 3 and 6 respectively.
• Example
  • Pat score 95/100 (95%) on the assignment.
  • Pat score 80% on the quiz.
  • Pat's assignment credit is 80%.
  • If the assignment is worth 5% overall, then it would contribute 4.0% to Pat's final grade.