How to succeed in CS230

You succeed by learning the course material well.
Some people think that success in a course means to get a high grade. However, if you get a high grade without having learned, it's not success; you have just postponed your learning.
We want you to succeed by learning!

So, how do we learn?

In recent years, with the help of neuroscience and cognitive science, we have discovered a lot about how we learn. I have found that the four pillars of learning, described by Stanislas Dehaene in his book "How We Learn" provide a nice synopsis of what affects our learning:

• Attention: Learning begins with focused attention. The brain filters relevant information and ignores distractions, making concentration essential for encoding new knowledge.
• Active Engagement: Active involvement, such as solving problems or testing hypotheses, strengthens neural connections and fosters deeper understanding compared to passive absorption.
• Error Feedback: Mistakes are a natural and vital part of learning. Immediate feedback helps the brain adjust, refine knowledge, and improve future performance.
• Consolidation: Sleep and repetition allow the brain to consolidate memories, stabilizing and integrating learning into long-term storage for future retrieval.

Learning is different from memorization. The latter might help you remember course material when cramming in the week before an exam, but within a few months, much of it is forgotten. Effective learning requires time and consistent effort.

Practical recommendations

Your instructors want you to succeed, and we will do all we can to help you learn the material and become a strong programmer. From your side, here are a few things you can do.

• Shut down your phone when you are in class or lab. And if you use a computer or a tablet for notes, make sure you have shut down any email or social media communication during class.
• Programming is hard: Do not blame yourself for your mistakes; just give yourself more time, and ask for help when needed.
• Programming is a skill: The best programmer is likely the one who has made every mistake in the books!
• Do not take more than 4 courses this semester and be prepared to spend at least 15 hours every week learning in this course.
• When working on course materials, turn off your social media.
• Attend all lectures, quit all social media while in class.
• Attend all labs, quit all social media while in class.
• Read the book twice a week.
• Do the quizzes and Monitor your learning through the weekly progress assessments.
• Read the book and slides BEFORE attempting to do the Assignments.
• Read assignment description immediately, and start thinking about it ASAP, not 1-2 days before it is due!
• Start assignments early, be prepared to make mistakes. That's how you learn a skill!

Course Overview

The Prerequisite for CS230 The prerequisite for CS230 is CS111, Computer Programming and Problem Solving.
If you have not completed successfully CS111, you must obtain permission by the instructor in order to enroll to this course.
Students with significant programming experience (including knowledge of Java), also need the permission of the instructor to enroll in CS230.

Computers All programming in CS230 will be done using BlueJ. If you want, you can use your own computer but you will have to maintain the software, and be prepared to use the department's machines if yours has problems. Sorry, the course instructors will not be able to help you trouble-shoot your own computer.

Class Discussion This semester we will be using the cs-230-03-sp25@wellesley.edu group email address for class discussion. If you have registered in the course, you already have access to this resource. When you send a message there, every student in the class receives it. (This means, if you need to talk to the instructors confidentially, email them directly.) The group email is useful to getting you help from classmates, the tutors, and the instructors. We encourage you to email your questions using an appropriate subject line.
Your instructors will use cs-230-03-sp25@wellesley.edu for several purposes. We will use it to make class announcements, such as corrections and clarifications of material discussed in class. We encourage you to post questions or comments that are of interest to students in the course.
Please note that this is a tool for you to interact with your peers, so do not post significant amounts of Java code (i.e. more than one or two lines of code) in your messages on the group! The instructors and TAs will read messages posted in the group on a daily basis and post answers to questions found there.
Answering questions is one of the best ways to learn something, so try to answer each other's questions. Also, as a reminder, there are no such things as stupid questions, and the act of formulating your question carefully is also an important part of the learning process. Writing is thinking. So please don't be shy to ask any question that might pop up. To encourage this, please make sure that your questions are public to your peers as well as your instructors.
You are also encouraged to use the cs-230-03-sp25@wellesley.edu group to find people to join a study group. You should plan on checking it on a regular basis.

Reading: It is expected that you read the relevant sections of the textbook and the class notes twice a week. It is a must that you do that before you start your assignments because they will seem much easier to complete then!
Textbook Regular readings will be assigned from the required text, Java Foundations, by Lewis, DePasquale and Chase. We will be using the 2nd edition though if you have access to a newer edition is fine. We recommend you buy your own copy because it can be useful for your future reference as well.
Class Notes In the syllabus, each lecture is linked to printable class notes (pdf). If you would like to use them to keep notes feel free to print them before class or just download them on your device. Please note that the slides linked on the syllabus are not intended to be fully-fledged notes for each class. They are starting slides that you can expand on during clas, when you take your own notes (as such, some of the slides might contain blanks).

Java Documentation Being able to understand and use the official Java Documentation is a characteristic of every successful programmer. Become familiar with it!

Course Requirements

Lectures There are two 75-minute lectures each week that will introduce the main content of the course.

In-person Labs Every student is required to complete and submit the weekly lab practice. Lab work will include exercises to review and reinforce the lecture material and to develop general programming, testing and debugging skills. The labs will also provide further opportunity to ask questions about course material.

In labs you will be working either with a partner, or individually. In general, note that some labs might contain more tasks than can reasonably be done in the available class time. This is on purpose! Labs are not a race to the finish, but are your opportunity to practice and explore the material together with your partner. Solutions to lab exercises will be provided at the end of the last lab day; you are encouraged to study these solutions. At the end of the day of your lab, each student is required to submit on Gradescope whatever lab work they have worked on until then. These submissions will be part of the student's participation grade (see "Grading Policy"). Some labs contain a 'pre-lab' as well. The link to these will probably be active no later than Monday morning. Pre-lab has to be completed individually and submitted before each lab. Please not that unsigned submissions receive no credit. You will have a chance to resubmit a version of your lab that is signed until the end of Friday of the same week.

Tutors: CS 230 is fortunate enough to have a number of excellent peer tutors: students who have taken CS 230 in the past and want to help others to succeed. They each hold office (drop-in) hours for two hours each week, and they are also available for one-on-one tutoring. Here are some norms you should remember:

• They only work for two hours. Please don't approach them outside their working hours or ask them to stay after their café hours have ended.
• Even if the tutor is a friend of yours, they have to respect the honor code with respect to CS 230, so don't ask them for help that you wouldn't ask of an instructor.
• One-on-one tutoring is also available for CS230. If you’d like to get some one-on-one tutoring, please reach out to your instructor. We will schedule a conversation about how you’ve been utilizing the existing resources, and come up with a plan for the future (which can include explicit goals we want the one-on-one sessions to achieve). Scheduled one-on-one sessions that you can no longer attend have to be canceled at least 24h in advance.

Project: During the last few weeks of the semester, project teams of 3 students work on an extended programming project from scratch. Your instructors will provide the general description of the project and you will have to write the specifications, and implement it based on the specifications.

Assignments For assignments, normally a subset of assigned problems will be graded. The full credit of the assignment will be based on the graded subset.

Exam: There will be a midterm and a final exam (scheduled at a fixed dte during College's exam period). The dates of the exams are fixed and listed on the schedule. Please mark the exam dates in your calendars as they are not flexible.

Learning Evaluations (aka: Grading Policy)

Active class participation is expected of every student who wants to succeed in the course, and includes (but is not limited to) attendance, participation in class discussions, and completing lab tasks and quizzes. Please note that if you miss class for any reason, it's your responsibility to obtain the class notes and topics from fellow peers (Courselore can be a resource here!).

Final Grades Your final grade for the course will be computed as a weighted average of several components. The relative weight of each component is shown below:

• 15%: Assignments
• 10%: In-person Labs: Teamwork, Participation and submission of work
• 25%: Midterm Exam (during the week before Spring Break)
• 35%: Final Exam (during exam period)
• 15%: Progress assessments, completed in 15 minutes during class, roughly once every week. They will be including several of the questions encountered in the Quizzes, so you will benefit greatly in studying the quizzes in advance.
• Total: 100%

There is no arbitrary limit on the number of A's, B's, C's etc., and every student will be assigned the grade they earn and deserve according to the grading standards of the college.

Weekly in-class Progress Assessments

You will be assessing your learning through weekly progress assessments (typically on Mondays). Progress assessments are of the same complexity as the weekly Quizzes, but selected so that they can be completed in 15 minutes in class at the beginning of the class. They serve as incentives to solidify your learning without falling behind. They are on the topics covered in the course since the beginning of the semester (not just the previous week).

Quizzes

They are additional learning materials to help you self-check your understanding of each topic. Once you submit a quiz, you will have access to the correct answers and you can re-submit each quiz any number of times.

1 - Introduction Quiz Ch.1
2 - Data and Expressions Quiz Ch.2
3 - Using Classes and Objects Quiz Ch.3
4 - Conditionals and Loops Quiz Ch.4
5 - Writing Classes Quiz Ch.5
7 - Arrays Quiz Ch.7
8 - Inheritance Quiz Ch.8
9 - Polymorphism Quiz Ch.9
10 - Exceptions Quiz Ch.10
11 - Recursion
12 - Analysis of Algorithms Quiz Ch.12
13 - Searching and Sorting Quiz Ch.13
14 - Stacks Quiz Ch.14
15 - Queues Quiz Ch.15
16 - Trees Quiz Ch.16
17 - Binary Search Trees and Heaps Quiz Ch.17/18
19 - Graphs Quiz Ch.19
20 - Hashing Quiz Ch.20

Assignments

There will be weekly assignments in which you will write Java programs that emphasize concepts discussed in class. Many of the assignments will be challenging. You may be required to work with a partner on the marked task(s) on some of the assignments. Keep in mind that programming often consumes more time than you expect. Start your assignments early! This will give you time to think about the problems and ask questions if you hit an impasse. Assignments are due as indicated on the class schedule.

It is strongly recommended that:

• You start reading the assignment as soon as it becomes available.
• You should not start working on it, however, until you have reviewed the class handouts and have resolved your questions by referring to the relevant chapters in the textbook.
• You re-read carefully the assignment and, using paper and eraser, you sketch the solution.
• Only after you have a reasonable understanding of the assignment and sketched the solution you start coding on the computer.
• Avoid using online technical sites (such as stack overflow, etc) when you try to code. While they may be rarely useful, they are not geared towards novice programmers and it is more likely they will confuse you. All of the answers that you need to work on your assignment are in the handouts, the book and the labs.

In other words, we strongly discourage from writing code as soon as you read the assignment, before you read the relevant material and using pen and pencil to sketch a solution. We also strongly discourage from searching the web for solution related to your assignments: using such code would be a violation of the honor code and is likely to lead you to confusion.

A running program is just the beginning. A program submitted that runs correctly on a particular input earns only 60% of the total grade. Careful testing that covers both the basic functionality and border cases will earn another 20% of the grade, if the testing is demonstrated. The remaining 20% of the grade is earned for good design that implements OOP, documentation that includes top-of-the-file description, method explanation, and in-line explanation as needed. Good programming style is also expected, including following the CS230 style guide.

Late Assignment Policy. Learning programming and data structures is really a sequential process because every new topic builds on the previous. We strongly encourage you to complete your assignment on time, but we know that sometimes this may not be possible. For any and all assignments, you could use an automatic 24 hour extension, no need to ask for permission. However, if that extra day is not sufficient for you to complete the assignment, you are required to contact the instructor and discuss a plan for completing the assignment before the assignment is due. We will work together to make sure that plan is a reasonable and effective so that it supports both your learning and your health. If you do not obtain permission, you can still email your assignment to Prof. Metaxas up to one additional day for half credit.

Here is overview on our collaboration policy, and it is followed by a more detailed explanation below:

• Assignments: Pairs of students (when explicitly announced in assignments description).
• Project: Teams of 3 students
• Progress assessments: Absolutely no collaboration
• Exams: Absolutely no collaboration

We believe that collaboration fosters a healthy and enjoyable educational environment. For this reason, we encourage you to talk with other students about the course material and to form study groups.

Programming assignments in this course can be challenging. Also teamwork and large-scale collaboration is the norm in the CS industry. Given the above, some of the assignment work is required to be done paired with a partner from the class, while some is required to be done individually. In each assignment tasks will be clearly marked as either "individual" or "pair-programming". The two team members must work closely together on the pair-programming tasks, and turn in a single copy of work they did together.

Pair-programming tasks are subject to the following ground rules:

• Each team member has to read the assignment problems, think of how to go on solving it, and sketch some solutions, before meeting with their partner.
• While working together, the work must be a true collaboration in which each member of the team will carry her own weight. It is not acceptable for two team members to split the work between them and work independently.
• The fact that team members have to program together means that you need to carefully consider a potential partner's schedule before forming a team. You cannot be an effective team if you cannot find large chunks of time to spend at a computer together!
• Except for the first few assignments that are to be done individually, when submitting an assignment, you have to decide on your partner for the next assignment.
• Working with different partners is a good way to build community in the class. We strongly recommend that you pair up with several other students during the semester.

In general, teams are allowed to discuss assignment tasks with other teams and exchange ideas about how to solve them. However, there is a thin line between collaboration and plagiarizing the work of others. Please do not cross this line.

Each team or individual student must compose their own solution to each task. Discussing strategies and approaches with classmates and receiving general debugging advice from them is acceptable and encouraged. However you (and your partner) are required to write and debug all of your code. Furthermore, you should never look at another student's code. For example, it is OK to borrow code from the textbook, from materials discussed in class, and from other sources as long as you give proper credit. However, it is unacceptable and constitutes a violation of the Honor Code (1) to write a program together with someone not part of your team and turn in two copies of the same program, (2) to copy code written by your classmates, (3) to read another student's or team's code (4) to view assignments, exams and solutions from previous terms of CS230, (5) to make any of the assignments, exams and solutions available to others online or off-line, or (6) to use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Github Co-pilot or any other language generation model. In keeping with the standards of the scientific community, you must give credit where credit is due (i.e. write their names at the top of the file). If you make use of an idea that was developed by (or jointly with) others, please reference them appropriately in your work. It is unacceptable for students to work together but not to acknowledge each other in their write-ups.

Policy on using AI tools in CS230

Our policy in CS230 regarding the use of generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard, or any other) is that it is an honor code violation to use generative AI tools for any purpose related to CS230 material while you complete an assignment or exam for CS230. It is also an honor code violation to copy any code from a generative AI tool and submit it as your work for an assignment or your project. You can use AI to support your learning process, but not to complete assignments or exams. The goal is to help you learn, not replace learning.

What's Not Allowed and is considered a violation of the Honor Code

• It's NOT allowed to use AI tools (like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Claude) while working on assignments or exams
• It's NOT allowed to submit any code generated by AI or found online as your own work.
• It's NOT allowed to submit code that contains statements that you do not understand how they work.

How You Can Use AI for Learning

• Generate practice questions to test your understanding
• Get alternative explanations for basic concepts
• Practice formulating questions before asking TAs or instructors

Important Reminders About AI Tools

• They can make mistakes and present incorrect information confidently
• Their knowledge may be outdated
• There are ongoing ethical concerns about AI training data and attribution

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Keeping Wellesley Healthy

For questions related to keeping yourself and the Wellesley community healthy during the pandemic, please check the Keeping Wellesley Healthy page regularly.

 

Disability Accommodations

If you have a disability or condition, either long-term or temporary, and need reasonable academic adjustments in this course, please contact Disability Services to get a letter outlining your accommodation needs, and submit that letter to your instructor. You should request accommodations as early as possible in the semester, or before the semester begins, since some situations can require significant time for review and accommodation design. If you need immediate accommodations, please arrange to meet with your instructor as soon as possible. If you are unsure but suspect you may have an undocumented need for accommodations, you are encouraged to contact Disability Services. They can provide assistance including screening and referral for assessments.

Disability Services can be reached at disabilityservices@wellesley.edu, at 781-283-2434, by scheduling an appointment online at their website , or by visiting their offices on the 3rd floor of Clapp Library, rooms 316 and 315.