1. Lab Assignments
2. Lab Submission Info
3. Lab Grading
4. How to Get Lab Help
5. General Stuff
6. Lab Attendance
7. Late Labs
8. Plagiarism Policy
9. Commenting and Program Style

Lab Assignments

The dates in the following table are tentative. They could change depending on the pace at which material gets presented in the course. Your lab score will be determined as follows:

1. Labs 0 and 0.5 are worth 50 points each.
2. Labs 1-4 and 6-11 are worth 100 points each. Lab 5 is worth 200 points.
3. The total of these labs is 1300 points. Your lab score will be determined as:

         lab percentage = lab score / 1200 * 100
       

   You can see that in effect one lab is an extra credit lab. Alternatively, if something comes up, such as an illness, something at work, the need to attend a conference, multiple exams in one week, etc., you do not have to submit a lab.
4. Because I have built in a one lab cushion, please do not ask for any extensions. The answer will be no.

Date	Lab	Due	In Lab Activity
1/8	Lab 0 - Learning Unix	6:00 AM, Monday, Jan 13	Learning Unix
1/15	Lab 1 - Checkerboard & Moonglow	6:00 AM, Wed, Jan 22	Debugging With Print Statements Lab 0.5 - Counting Gold: The warm-up lab Due 6:00 AM, Saturday, Jan 18 (hard deadline: no late submissions accepted). Also note that Dr. Plank labels this lab as Lab 0 but I am calling it Lab 0.5 to distinguish it from the one you worked on in lab last Wednesday.
1/22	Lab 2 - Fun with PGM files	6:00 AM, Wed, Jan 29	gdb
1/29	Lab 3 - More fun with PGM files	Partial Submission: Due 6:00 AM, Wed, Feb 5 See lab write-up for which methods are due and which test cases must work for the partial submission. Hard submission deadline for the partial submission--no late partial submissions accepted. Complete Lab: Due 6:00 AM, Mon, Feb 10	An introduction to Topcoder
2/5	Lab 3 - More fun with PGM files - Continued	Partial submission was due earlier today. Complete Lab: Due 6:00 AM, Mon Feb. 10	Topcoder SRM 346 D2, 250-pointer (Diamond Hunt)--use the find and substr methods for a string
2/12	Lab 4 - Hash tables with open addressing	6:00 AM, Wednesday, Feb. 19	SRM 583, D2, 250-Pointer (SwappingDigits)
2/19	Lab 5 - Bit Matrices	All methods in Bitmatrix and BM_Hash: Due 6:00 AM, Wed, Feb. 26 (Hard deadline--no late submissions for the partial submission) Sum, Product, Sub_Matrix, and Inverse: Due 6:00 AM, Wed, Mar. 4	Midterm 1 coding problems
2/26	Lab 5 - Bit Matrices	Partial submission deadline is past. Complete lab due 6:00 AM, Wed, Mar 4	gdb with pointers
3/4	Lab 6 - Candy Crush	6:00 AM, Wed. Mar 11	gdb with linked lists
3/11	Lab 7- A server to process codes	6:00 AM, Wed. Mar. 25	Go over the coke code lab
3/25	Lab 8 - Linked Lists	6:00 AM, Wed, Apr. 1	palindrome
4/1	Lab 9 - Recursion (Shape Shifter!!)	6:00 AM, Saturday, Apr. 11	Midterm 2 coding problems
4/8	Lab 9 - Recursion (Shape Shifter!!) Continued	6:00 AM, Saturday, Apr. 11	tree height
4/15	LabA (Lab 10)- Binary Search Trees	6:00 AM, Sat. Apr. 18	tree find
4/22	LabB (Lab 11)- AVL Trees	6:00 AM, Sat. Apr. 25 (hard deadline--no late submissions accepted)	SRM 730, D1, 250-Pointer (StonesOnATree)

Lab Submission Info

Lab Grading

Your lab grade will be determined as follows:

• Correctness (80%): The grading script will be used to compute your correctness score.
• Commenting and Program Style (20%): Are the programs well-organized, well commented (including meaningful variable names), and do they solve the problem in the most straightforward, efficient way possible? See the section Commenting and Program Style for commenting and style guidlines.

How to Get Lab Help

There are three ways to get lab help:

1. Visit me during my office hours or make an appointment.
2. Visit the TAs in the programming clinic during their office hours. See the TA web page for their office hours.
3. Post a question to Piazza. This is the best way to get help during non-office hours, and during the evening and the weekends. Please do not post code publicly to Piazza. If you have a query about code, please make it a private post to me and the TAs. When you make a private query about code, please post all of your code, not just a code snippet. It is usually impossible to debug a program from a code snippet since it is almost always the case that the bug occurred somewhere else in the program and is only manifesting itself in that snippet of code.

Please remember that both the TAs and I have obligations outside this class, and do not expect immediate answers to your Piazza questions. We will do our best to monitor Piazza and answer questions as expeditiously as possible. On evenings and weekends you may well be on your own but everyone in the class is strongly encouraged to answer Piazza questions. When it comes time to adjust borderline grades, I will look favorably on those of you who have actively answered questions on Piazza.

General Stuff

• Here are pointers to a couple useful documents:
  1. gdb cheat sheet
  2. vi--text editor

• Always test your code on the hydra machines. The TAs will test your code on these machines and will deduct points if your code does not compile or crashes. Occasionally code that compiles and/or executes on my Macintosh does not compile and/or execute on the hydra machines, so it stands to reason that your code may suffer the same fate.

• Make sure that you keep up-to-date with class announcements on Piazza as they will frequently address lab questions.

Lab Attendance

Late Labs

You can submit your lab up until 3 days after the due date but 10 points per day will be deducted from your final score. As I indicated earlier, please do not ask for extensions. If you plan your time well, you should have the lab pretty much complete before the last day. If you put off the lab to the last minute and then something comes up, such as an illness, then you will need to submit the lab late. Also, please give yourself several minutes before the 6:00AM deadline to submit to Blackboard. If you try to submit at 06:00AMm and for some reason it does not submit properly, you will lose 10 points for lateness.

Plagiarism Policy

You must write your labs alone. Obviously, you may talk about your labs with the TA's and with other students, but ultimately you must write your own code. Otherwise, it is plagiarism.

A few notes:

• It is fine, and encouraged, for you to post questions to Piazza. As noted earlier, please do not post code there, unless you make it a private post to me and the TAs.

• With the exception of Piazza, I consider it cheating to post any query about an assignment to the internet. If I discover that you have posted a query about an assignment on the internet, you will receive an F in the class.

• Protect your directories so that no one can read them. If you do all of your work in ~/cs140, then right now, do:

  UNIX> chmod 1700 ~/cs140
  

  If someone cheats off of you, chances are we cannot determine that, since file access times can be modified. In the past, when I have discovered cheating, both parties (cheater and cheatee) get punished. Protect yourself.

• Punishment for a cheating offense can range from a 0 on the assignment to an F in the course and my sending a letter to academic misconduct. The punishment depends on how seriously I view your transgression.

Commenting and Program Style

1. Writing Nice Code by Prof. Ian Horswill, Northwestern University and Prof Lynne Parker, Univ. of Tennessee.
2. Commenting Your Code by Prof. James Plank, University of Tennessee.
3. Writing Clean Code by Prof. Brad Vander Zanden, University of Tennessee.