[Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Phil Dorin, teacher, mentor and friend.]
The rigorous application of computing paradigms and principles to the development of software systems for solving engineering problems, with hands-on programming comprising a significant portion of the course. Laboratory exercises and projects are implemented with modern languages, toolsets, and libraries for scientific computing and linear algebra. Topics include data structures including arrays, lists, and balanced trees; traditional algorithms for searching and sorting; and algorithms for computational geometry, large-scale data processing, and machine learning. Intended for Engineering majors only, computer science majors will take CMSI 2120 and 2130.
This class uses Python for its concrete examples, homework, and exams. There will be some class time spent reviewing Python fundamentals at the beginning of the semester. You are more than welcome to ask for whatever clarification you need at any time, either in class or out. If you require additional practice with Python, there are any number of online tutorials which you can use to hone your skills. In addition you can use other professors' web sites [either LMU or other schools] and things like Code Academy, Kahn Academy, codingbat.com, and the ubiquitous Stack Overflow to help you when you are stuck. You can even ask your humble professor in a pinch — I'm always glad to help! |
This course will be in person
, and will be recorded [mostly — there
are times when I forget to start the thing]. Video recordings will be posted to the course BrightSpace
page. Every effort will be made to post the videos in a timely manner so that they are available as
close to the ending of each class session as possible.
You will also need to have access to the BrightSpace course page
for section 1 for this class. On
those pages you will find links to some video information of course content and how-to
demonstrations. Your access to that site should be automatic; if you have problems accessing it contact
me or the wonderful and amazing LMU IT department for assistance.
Note that the official course description above is not very specific.... there is more detail below!
Learning data structures, like anything else, takes practice and perseverance. You must be willing to make mistakes, to learn how to fix them, and to learn not to be afraid of them. Humans [and now even computers!] learn by making mistakes, and this is the place to do so without fear.
When you finish the course, you will be able to:
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In accordance with the LMU Credit Hour Policy, the credit standard for this 4-unit standard 17-week course is met by an expected workload of a total of 180 hours of student engagement with the course learning activities [at least 45 hours per credit], which includes regularly scheduled instructor-student meeting times and/or equivalent direct faculty instruction, such as systematic readings, research activities under the supervision of the instructor, asynchronous presentations, group work, and other learning activities. You should also anticipate needing additional time outside of class to complete assignments. The University's Credit Unit Policy can be found here.
In a nutshell, here's what you'll need to do to be successful in this course. *YOU* promise to:
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…and *I* promise to:
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Course content will be delivered using a combination of lecture, discussion, problem-based learning, group work, projects, presentations, critiques, community-based learning, portfolios, etc. All work will be submitted using a GitHub repository. Use of GitHub and all other tools required for the course will be explained during class sessions. However, it will be up to the students to handle any and all installation on their respective computer. Of course, if you need help, it will be available! There are Teaching Assistants in the Keck Lab [Doolan 112], and you can always ask your classmates. Your humble professor will be available as well, and I'll do my best to make the concepts as clear as I can! |
There is NO required textbook for the course.
There is one optional textbook for this course, which is NOT for sale in the LMU Bookstore:
This book will be used for ancillary material. It is VERY good for you to have on your programmer's bookshelf in some form, because it is full of lessons to help you write high-quality and easily maintained code.
THE BOOK IS NOT AVAILABLE IN THE LMU BOOKSTORE. It is available at many other fine retail outlets, both online and brick-and-mortar. We will not be using it for homework assignments, but WILL be using it for general reading and information, as well as for tutorials both in and out of the classroom.
Although we won't be covering any books in their entirety for this class, we will be using several books and online web pages and videos as primary or secondary resources.
There is also a large number of other resources which can be used to "mine the gold" for related
information about data structures. The topic is a very broad field, which has been around for a
very long time, and touches almost every aspect of computer science. Any Internet search on data
structures
will turn up at least ten million links. Many of these will be shared during class, and
you will be required to find some information about specific topics on your own. You may even be
required to use the LMU library, [GASP!!] so be
prepared!
There are no lab fees associated with this course.
A list of topics that are covered, and the approximate order and time frame in which they will be discussed, is available on the class notes page for this site.
Since there is no textbook, there will be no assigned reading list
— that wouldn't make
any sense, would it?! Instead, here are some good things to read online, or videos to watch about how
things work, or some other interesting [hopefully!] things for you to check out. Be prepared to talk
about some interesting things you learned or observed at the start of class for that week!
All written homework assignments are due at the beginning of the class on the date they are due. There are some professors who set due dates at midnight or some such, but that is NOT the case here – the homework is due at the start of the class on the due date. Homework will be due on the second class meeting day of the week. This will give you time to visit me during office hours for questions before the assignment is due, and will give ME time to evaluate your work over the weekend to return it to you promptly the next week. Deviation from this process requires prior consent of the instructor.
Every effort is made to ensure assignments, required deliverables, and due dates are prominently posted on these pages; it is your responsibility to make sure you know what is due and when it is due.
You may certainly turn assignments in late; I will happily accept and evaluate them so you get the
benefit of feedback on the assignment, but they will be reduced in grade by one letter for each day
they are late. Day
means day
, not workday
or class day
; an A+
homework due on Thursday which is not turned in until the following Tuesday will unfortunately only
earn a failing grade, unless some prior arrangements are made with the instructor due to illness or
some major schedule conflict. However, if you want to turn something in late, I'll still provide
feedback even for assignments which have no chance of any credit; I keep this policy to allow you to
get the learning benefit of the assignment. My philosophy is that it is important for the student to
know the material, even if an assignment doesn't get the best marks.
All assignments must use proper American English and/or Programming Language spelling and grammar. Failure to do so will cost you points on every assignment, so get a spell-checker and a grammar checker, or find a friend who is proficient to proofread your work before it is submitted.
Most of your work will be submitted using GitHub; however, any assignments which are to be printed out for submission must be printed on a printer.
Other than these simple rules, there are no requirements for formatting, fonts, colors, diagrams, or anything else with respect to your homework assignments, other than good code craftsperson-ship.
You will need to create a GitHub repository. Please use the naming convention and the directory
structure as it is shown on the Week 01 web page in the
Assignment Submission
section.
Make sure the repo is a PRIVATE repo. I realize that this kind of flies in the face of the idea of "Open Source Culture"; however, the reason is that if the repo is public, I can't post updated evaluations since everyone will be able to see your results, which are Personally Identifiable Information [PII] and thus must be kept private.
There will be four homework assignments during the semester, due on the days shown in the list below. Each assignment will contain several exercises to help give you experience with the concepts covered. Each of these assignments is detailed on a separate web page; they are available from the links below. Solutions will be provided after ALL the assignments are handed in. This policy provides a motivation for everyone to turn assignments in on time, since NO ONE gets the solutions until EVERYONE has submitted their work.
MAKE SURE THAT BOTH MEMBERS OF YOUR TEAM ARE ABLE TO ACCESS THE REPO, AND MAKE SURE TO ALSO INVITE ME TO BE A CONTRIBUTOR so that I can upload your evaulation results.
There will also be weekly in-class exercises
which serve to reinforce the week's
concepts presented in class. They will be submitted in your GitHub repo, but are only part of your
class participation AND ARE NOT PART OF YOUR GRADE. They provide an
indication of your progress and understanding. They are practice drills, but are good for maintaining
and improving your skills. Also, having access to your repo helps ME to help YOU ~ I can take a regular
look to see how you are doing, and you can also commit code that is in process
with which you
need my help.
By the way, GitHub has no limit on storage. PLEASE DON'T HESITATE TO COMMIT YOUR CODE! There is no harm in committing code frequently so you have a 'baseline' – this can be VERY handy!
There will be two quizzes during the semester, scheduled for Thursday of week six and
Thursday of week 11. Note that they are interspersed with the homework assignments, such that there
will not be any homework assignment due on a test date. Note that due to popular convention, the
quizzes
will be known as tests
henceforth, and are cumulative.
There will be a final exam, which will be scheduled per the university's official
exam schedule. Check the date and time on the schedule Final Exam schedule, which is easily available
here.
At this writing, the exam is scheduled for this section as follows:
Class Start Time | Class Days | Exam Start Time | Exam Day |
---|---|---|---|
13:45 PM | Tuesday-Thursday | 11:00 [11:00 AM] | Thursday |
Missed quizzes or tests: it is the responsibility of the student to provide adequate advance notice to the professor if a scheduled quiz or test is going to be missed. If you have a conflict in schedule which will cause a missed exam, please notify the professor at least two days in advance, if possible, to avoid a failing grade for that exam. Prior arrangements must be made in order for a make-up exam to be taken, since this situation requires the professor to create a second copy of the exam/quiz/test.
You will need access to a computer of some variety. …Well, Duh… If you don't have a computer available, let me know and I will try to work with Masao to get something set up for you using a computer in the Keck Lab on campus. |
You should download and install the Python environment from the Python downloads site.. The latest version at this writing is Python 3.12.0. If you are working on a Mac computer, you may have Python installed already; however, it is likely not the latest version and the versions are quite different The version that is shipped with the Mac O/S is usually 2.7 — much has changed!
You will also need to install and use some sort of text editor into which you can type your code in ASCII/Unicode text-only form. You cannot use a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Mac's TextEdit [unless you configure it properly] or other word-processing software which puts in \ special characters that Python won't recognize [like those slanted quotes]. Several possible free tools are available, such as the following:
You can certainly use Notepad [on Windows] or TextEdit [on Mac, if properly configured for plain text]
to edit your source code, but it can be difficult to collaborate with these tools due to the lack of
line numbers at the left margin. Also, there is no syntax coloring in those editors. On Mac, in the
terminal window you can use the vi
or vim
or gvim
editors, but they take some
getting used to and are rather an acquired taste
unless you are going to be doing a great deal
of programming on UNIX or Linux.
Another helpful tool is a testing framework. While test code, or at least skeletons
for test code, will be provided to you for some projects, there is a very nice free test framework
called PyUnit
that can help you a lot. It is available for free download from
this site, which also has
complete instructions for setup and use, and some sample code to help you make sure it works. After
youhave downloaded both files, follow the Getting Started
instructions at
this location.
Students are expected to attend classes as part of the expected workload, as explained above. You should arrive on time to all course meetings, prepared to engage in the course content. Arriving late or leaving early disrupts the learning experience. You are expected to notify the instructor in advance whenever possible if you will miss a class or if you anticipate arriving late or leaving early. You are expected to participate in all class activities — participation in this course is measured by how much you engage in the content and the activities. Activities are provided to assist your learning and help your progress toward the final assignments. As such, no assignments are optional unless they are labeled as optional.
Obviously, if you skip too many classes, you will likely not do well in the course, since you will miss important parts of the material; this is a simple and self-fulfilling prophecy.
I want to emphasize that I care about your learning. As part of your learning process
in this class, I would like to invite you to evaluate yourself and participate in your own assessment
for the class. It is important to me to know how you are doing – for example, are you
understanding the concepts, are you able to put them into real-life situations and examples, are you
connecting and engaging with the material, are the explanations clear to you. That is part of why there
are in-class exercises
every week, to give you experience with the concepts for that week.
Another thing — part of your class participation is to do the weekly in-class exercises and upload them to your GitHub repository. You will need to create the repository in the form that is given on the week one page, so that I can find them. These submissions will *NOT* be a part of your course grade other than as part of your participation.
The class participation rubric appears with the grading stuff in the tables further down the page.
There will be no 'outside' extra credit given in this course. There are a couple of problems in the set of homeworks which are optional and will provide extra credit on those particular assignments if you so choose.
Please review the Academic Degree Requirements and Policy information found here. Grades for the course are assigned according to the weighting factors shown in the tables below. Though it is uneven in its distribution, which [being OCD] I really dislike, your final letter grades will be assigned based on the following scale, which will be rounded to the nearest integer as appropriate:
Percent | Letter | Rating and Achievement |
---|---|---|
90 - 100% | A / A- | Professional quality work; outstanding |
80 - 89% | B+ / B / B- | Entry-level quality work; above average, shows extra effort and interest |
70 - 79% | C+ / C / C- | Satisfactory work; expected with reasonable effort |
60 - 69% | D | Substandard work; minimal effort shown |
59 or less | F | Thank you for playing; see you next semester |
Evaluation Item | Weight |
---|---|
Homework [total, all 4] | 20% |
Github config correct | 05% |
Quiz #1 | 15% |
Quiz #2 | 20% |
Final Exam | 30% |
Class Participation | 10% |
Class Participation Criteria [Each Class Meeting] | Value |
---|---|
Absent *without* prior notification/agreement of professor | 0 pts |
Absent *with* prior notification/agreement of professor OR | 5 pts |
Present in class, and hopefully: Demonstrates excellent preparation from readings and other material. Offers analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; puts together pieces of the discussion to develop new approaches that take the class further. Also, has in-class code checked in to proper classwork folder for the week.
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Also of note…
An incomplete will be granted only when the requesting student has done at least 80% of the coursework, and has at least a B average in the course work completed. This policy is standard LMU policy.
Leave of Absence/Withdrawal Policy:
Please read the policy in the University Bulletin.
NOTE: All work is evaluated for both technical merit and quality of written and/or
oral presentation. Find yourself a good spelling and grammar checker, or a
trusted human editor, if you are having any difficulty with the rules of standard English language usage.
Another excellent resource is the Academic Resource
Center [ARC], located on the south side of Daum Hall. The center takes appointments, and also
allows drop-in consultation sessions, and they have a number of good benefits. Call (310) 338-2847 to
schedule an appointment. [For those that don't know, Daum Hall is the building where the LMU Security
and Parking office used to be, which is not the home of ITS. ARC is on the second floor.]
The ARC also provides student support in the form of University advising, writing support, tutoring services, and first-to-go support, as well as:
Writing & Course Tutoringlink in myLMU.
Another thing to remember is, your coding style is just as important a part of your assignment evaluations as correctly running code. I WILL NOT HESITATE to take points off for code that has hard-coded numbers, lack of proper comments, poorly aligned indenting, etc. EVEN IF THE CODE RUNS CORRECTLY! Further, let me re-state that code that does not compile will be not be evaluated and you will have to do it over to get any credit for the assignment. Remember that I compile and run your code from the command line so just because it works in your editor is not a guarantee that it will work for me. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes.
FAIR WARNING!!! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!! FAIR WARNING!!!
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FAIR WARNING!!! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!! FAIR WARNING!!!
Student feedback on this course provides valuable information for continued improvement. All students are expected to fairly and thoughtfully complete a course evaluation for this course. All course evaluations for the Seaver College of Science and Engineering are administered online through the Blue™ evaluation system. You will receive several e-mail notifications at your Lion e-mail address when the evaluation form is available near the end of the term. You may also access the evaluation form on Brightspace during the evaluation period. A few minutes of class time will be reserved for you to complete a course evaluation near the end of the semester. Please bring a laptop, smart phone, tablet or other mobile device to class on this date so that you can access the online evaluation platform.
General StatementLoyola Marymount University is a community dedicated to academic excellence, student-centered education, and the Jesuit and Marymount traditions. As such, the University expects all members of its community to act with honesty and integrity at all times, especially in their academic work. Academic honesty respects the intellectual and creative work of others, flows from dedication and pride in performing one's own best work, and is essential if true learning is to take place. As an LMU Lion, by the Lion's Code, you are pledged to join the discourse of the academy with honesty of voice and integrity of scholarship. Academic dishonesty will be treated as an extremely serious matter, with severe consequences that can range from receiving no credit for an assignment or test to failing the class, to expulsion.
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For an additional resource, see and the LMU Honor Code and Process
found at:
this link.
unauthorized useand, therefore, prohibited
The DSS Office offers resources to enable students with physical, learning, ADD/ADHD, psychiatric disabilities and those on the autism spectrum to achieve maximum independence while pursuing their educational goals. Staff specialists interact with all areas of the University to eliminate physical and attitudinal barriers. Students must provide documentation for their disability from an appropriate licensed professional. Services are offered to students who have established disabilities under state and federal laws. We also advise students, faculty and staff regarding disability issues. Students who need reasonable modifications, special assistance, academic accommodations or housing accommodations should direct their request to the DSS Office as soon as possible. All discussions will remain confidential.
The DSS Office is located on the 2nd floor of Daum Hall and may be reached by email at dsslmu@lmu.edu or phone at (310) 338-4216. Please visit http://www.lmu.edu/dss for additional information.
Students should also keep in mind that resources are available through the Library [https://library.lmu.edu] and Information Technology Services [https://its.lmu.edu]. The DSS Office can help students connect with the appropriate person at the Library and ITS.
As an LMU Lion, by the Lion's code, you are pledged to join the discourse of the academy with honesty of voice and integrity of scholarship and to show respect for staff, professors, and other students.
The following LMU documents are available to reference:
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For more information on this or any other conduct issues, please refer to the Student Codes and Policies section in the Community Standards. The Lion's Code, Student Conduct Code, Honor Code and Process, and information on many other policies are available from that link. You can find any and all other related data from the Office of Student Conduct & Community Responsibility web page. Also check the main Student Affairs Department Website.
Electronic Devices: Pretty easy — please turn off your cell phone ringer during class time. That's it for me! However…
The official LMU language for this is:
Please turn off and put out of sight all electronic devices (other than those and when allowed)
during class-time. The interruptions and/or distractions they cause disrupt class and interfere
with the learning process. Even if you are not on video, it's distracting to you.
Public Safety can be reached 24/7/365 at 310.338.2893 [or x222 from a campus phone]. In a life-threatening emergency, call 911 first and then call Public Safety if possible. To report an incident, call Public Safety, submit an e-report on the Public Safety website or via the Rave Guardian mobile app, or visit Public Safety in Foley Annex. Review evacuation information and other safety tips posted in each learning space. Make sure you're registered to receive emergency alerts – confirm your contact information in PROWL, and also download Rave Guardian in the Apple or Google Play store. For more information and emergency preparedness tips, visit https://publicsafety.lmu.edu.
To report an emergency or suspicious activity, contact the LMU Department of Public Safety by phone (x222 or 310-338-2893) or at the nearest emergency call box. In the event of an evacuation, follow the evacuation signage throughout the building to the designated safe refuge area where you will receive further instruction from Public Safety or a Building Captain.
For purposes of evacuating the Doolan Hall or Pereira buildings, our safe area
is the sunken
gardens. There will be people to guide you.
For more safety information and preparedness tips, visit http://www.lmu.edu/emergency.
Office hours are listed at the top of this syllabus page. I will make every effort to be available during those hours, and if I cannot for some emergency reason, I'll make sure you all know about it in advance if possible. Since we are, for the present, back in person on campus, my office hours will be held IN MY OFFICE!!! HUZZAH!!!
I am also always available by e-mail at: my LMU mail address
YOU MUST CHECK YOUR LION EMAIL ADDRESS OF RECORD. I will
start the semester's communications by sending all email blasts to everyone's lion.lmu.edu
email
address, which is known as your address of record. It is important for
me to have an email address which you will check on a regular basis.
If necessary, this syllabus and its contents are subject to revision. Students are responsible for any changes or modifications announced or distributed in class, emailed to students' LMU Lion accounts or posted on LMU's course management system, Brightspace. If you are absent from an in-person or online class meeting, it is your responsibility to check Brightspace [and/or the course website] and to check with the professor to see if you missed any important class announcements. Students should not rely on word-of-mouth from classmates.