Preparing for class
This course is designed to be self-paced, with each student working during the class laboratory sessions. You must bring your own laptop to class in order to download materials and work through the exercises in the coursebooks. The instructor will be present to answer questions, facilitate setup as necessary, and assess exercise completion.
Exercises
As the best way to learn computational tools is to use them, there are a number of questions and practice exercises that will be available for each topic covered in a workbook chapter. These will generally be fairly short and are designed for you to become familiar with the concepts behind the tools. You must submit answers to the chapter exercise sets you would like to count towards your grade. This can be done by email submission to the instructor (code in some cases, written up answers to questions in others) and/or by demonstrating code functionality to the instructor during class (for code only).
Larger course exercises are also available, and involve using the skills acquired through the chapter exercise sets to solve a real-world style problem. These will serve in place of exams or papers. You are expected to turn in the following for each project:
- A file containing code that can be executed. (In most cases, code will be evaluated on a test input set to see how it functions.)
- Answers to any questions asked in the larger exercise.
Two options are available for determining your grade:
- Option A: Six chapter exercise sets + one larger exercise.
- Option B: Four chapter exercise sets + two larger exercises.
Note that you can choose any exercise sets and larger exercise(s) to submit. All that matters is that the appropriate number of each is submitted.Also, please note that the CHILDES chapter exercise sets count as a single exercise set because they're very short. So, for example, if you choose Option B and complete the CHILDES chapter exercise sets, you still need to submit three other exercise sets.