Instructors

Scott Anderson
Office: E114 Science Center, x3249
Email: sanderso@wellesley.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 2-3, and Friday 2-5. I will also be in on Thursday evenings, starting around 9pm and lasting until at least 11pm (usually later), when there is an assignment the next day. Finally, I'm happy to meet you by appointment. See my Google calendar

Jean Herbst
Office: E129 Science Center, x3162
Email: jherbst@wellesley.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 4:00-5:00, Tuesdays 3:00 - 4:00, Wednesdays 6:15 - 7:15,Thursdays 3:00 - 4:00, and by appointment

Tutors & Drop-in Hours

We have several student tutors who will hold weekly drop-in hours in E101, starting in February:

If you need additional help after taking advantage of the drop-in hours and your instructor's office hours, you may request a one-on-one tutor from the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center.

Textbooks

There are two textbooks that we will be using this semester:

A wonderful book that we used in the past, but decided to drop only because of the scarcity of time is Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Leeden, and Harry Lewis (Addison-Wesley, 2008). All chapters of this book are available online. You might treat yourself to some reading from that book.

You may also find it helpful to consult some of the following books, which we have used in previous semesters. Although some of the material they present is out-of-date, much of it is still useful. Look in E101 for copies of these books:

Course Directory

The CS110 course folder is located on cs.wellesley.edu in the same directory as all the CS110 student accounts. This directory contains material relevant to the class, including course software, and online versions of lecture notes, assignments, and programs. From a browser, all this information is available via links from the class web page:

http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs110

(The Computer Science Department's server is known both as cs and tempest; we will use both names interchangeably.)

Course Site in Sakai

There is a CS110 site in Sakai named CS-110-01 SP-13. The main purpose of the Sakai site is to administer quizzes. Class announcements and discussions are administered through Google Groups.

Course Announcements in Google Groups

The Google Group CS-110-SP13-Announcements will be used for announcements such as corrections to assignments and clarifications of material discussed in class. Read all the announcements on a regular basis. The announcements will be delivered to your Wellesley email account, and can also be accessed via the Groups link at the top of your Wellesley Gmail account.

There is another Google group called CS-110-SP13-Questions for you and your fellow students to ask and answer questions. The faculty and tutors will monitor it as well, but you should try to answer other students' questions, because it is helpful to the other person and also to yourself, as it will clarify things in your own understanding. This conference is also a good place to find project partners or students to join a study group.

Our understanding is that you have to post to the Questions conference via the web interface, rather than email. This will allow you to scan to see if your question has alread been asked and answered and so forth. This is the first time we're doing this, so please let us know if things aren't working as you think they should.

Some tips on posting to CS-110-SP13-Questions:

Course Work

Course work includes exams, quizzes, homework assignments, in-class discussions, and a term project. How these contribute to your grade is described in the section on grading policy.

Assignments

There are 7 homework assignments this semester. They are based on the lectures and readings and are designed to help you with the reading and to develop your skills as web designers and programmers. They range from straightforward to challenging.

The assignments are posted by their due dates (generally on Fridays) in the course schedule. We may tinker with them a little, adding clarifications and such, but they will be largely unchanged.

When planning your schedule, keep in mind that computers and printers take a special joy in breaking down when you are most desperate. Try to leave time to deal with last-minute emergencies, and remember that outside of laboratory hours, you may have to compete with other students for a machine.

Work will NOT be accepted after the time at which it is due. If you have not completed an assignment, you should still turn in whatever you have for partial credit. In extenuating circumstances (e.g., sickness, personal crisis, family problems, religious holidays), you may request an extension. The instructors in the course will decide as a group whether to grant extensions. Furthermore, the “no late assignments” policy means that once you have turned something in, you should not modify it after the deadline has passed, so that when we grade it, it's still exactly what you turned in.

Quizzes

We will be using the quiz feature of Sakai to administer online quizzes before most, maybe all, lecture classes. These will be a few (3-5) multiple-choice questions that are based solely on the readings for that lecture. The questions are not intended to be difficult; rather, we want to make your pre-class reading more effective and educational by making you a more engaged reader. These quiz questions will be accumulated over the semester into the equivalent of one test. (For example, if we had four questions per lecture for 25 lectures, each question would be worth 1 point.)

Exams

There will be one in-class midterm examination. See the course schedule for the date of this exam. There will be no makeup examination without prior arrangement with your instructor.

There will be a self-scheduled final exam during the final exam period.

As noted in the Honor Code section below, both the midterm and final exams are open-book and open-notes, but only your own books and notes. You may also bring in any review materials we distribute to all students. You may not consult any materials from past offerings of CS110. You may bring a calculator, but you may not use your smartphone or any other technological support.

If you have an electronic book, you may use your laptop or e-reader to access that material as if it were a printed book, but you may not use the laptop for actions that a person with a printed book could not do, such as searching the web.

Term Project

CS110 has a Term Project. Class members form teams of two students. Each team finds a client or other resource person to help design, develop, and demonstrate a web presence. The project should be related to an area in which you (and your partner and client) have some special interest.

The projects proceed in several phases, and the due dates for each phase may be found in the course schedule. You will receive detailed instructions for each phase of the project. All project deadlines are firm. Teams will lose points for missed deadlines.

More information about the Term Project is available via the project link in the navigation bar at the upper left or by clicking here.

Grading Policy

This course complies with the Wellesley College policy (http://www.wellesley.edu/Registrar/gradingpolicy_faq.html). While that policy asks faculty to hold each 100- and 200-level course with 10 or more students to an average of no higher than 3.33, it does not require faculty to grade on a "curve." There is no arbitrary limit on the number of A's, B's, C's etc., and every student will be assigned the grade she earns and deserves according to the grading standards of the college.

The final grade in the class will be computed as a weighted average of each of the course requirements above. The relative weight of each component is outlined below:

Quizzes   2%
Midterm Exam   18%
Homework   20%
Final Exam   25%
Term Project   35%

In-class exercises in lectures and labs are not collected and graded. They are for your benefit.

Extra Credit

Students sometimes ask whether they can do something for extra credit. While we appreciate the zeal this displays, our policy does not allow extra credit. The reason is that many students would like to improve their grade by doing extra credit, and so, to be fair, we must offer the extra credit to all students. But then all we've done is make the course harder and more time-consuming.

To improve your grade, we suggest doing better on the later work, particularly the final exam. If someone does great on the final exam, or even just beats her average, it helps us give you the benefit of the doubt if you are fall on the dividing line between two grades.

Honor Code

The Honor Code applies to this course. You are encouraged to discuss assignments with other students, and with your instructors. However, you must solve, write up, debug, test and document the assignment on your own. In other words, it is acceptable to talk with other students in English (or any other human language), but not acceptable to use any formal language and especially not HTML, CSS or JavaScript. You should not be looking at other peoples' code or showing them yours. If you worked with others or you have obtained help from any source, you must acknowledge their contribution in writing.

Homework assignments must be your own work. You may not look at solutions from other students, either from the current offering of CS110 or from past offerings.

Exams are open-book and open-notes, but only your own books and notes. You may also bring in any review materials we distribute to all students. You may not consult any materials from past offerings of CS110.

Your project work will comprise both the content of the site and the coding of the site. Content consists of things like text, pictures, PDF. For example, if your project is the website of a student organization, it might include the organization's constitution, descriptions and pictures of their activities. The constitution will, of course, not be your work. Some of the pictures may have been taken by members of the organization. It would make no sense to forbid you from using this content. However, all the coding of the site should be your work: the HTML coding, the CSS coding, the JavaScript coding must all be the work of your team. If you find some coding from a website other than the CS110 website and you would like to borrow it, you must clear this with your team advisor. You must carefully document what code is to be borrowed or modified, giving proper credit both in the coding files themselves using comments, and in your P3_changes.html document. You must document where you got the code from and how you adapted it for your project. Human memory is fallible, so it is not acceptable to get your advisor's verbal agreement: You must get prior, written authorization, and then carefully document this, so there is no question of proper authorship.

Furthermore, because project work is done by a team, you must make clear who did each part of the project. If one partner did all the work for a particular page, her name can be put in comments at the top of the code file for the page stating this. If work on a page was divided, that must also be carefully documented with comments in the code. For co-authored documents, namely the requirements, design and testing documents, both students must contribute to the document. Both names being on the document means that both teammates contributed to it, so it is a violation of the honor code to have your name on the document if you did no work and it is a violation to put your teammate's name on it if she did no work.

You will be assigned a course account on the CS file server that includes a password to access the account. It is a violation of the honor code to share this password with anyone.

Students with Special Needs

If you have special needs of any kind, please meet with your instructors to discuss accommodations that may be helpful to you.