CMSC15100 — Winter 2022

This term, the first two weeks of the course will be taught online with synchronous lectures and lab sections. The University expects to resume in-person classes starting the third week of the term.

If you need to contact the course staff via written communication, you should do so using our Ed Discussion site, described below.

In CMSC 15100 (informally CS151), we introduce a selection of major computer science topics through instruction in computer programming and various analytical techniques.

CS151 is designed for students intending to major or minor in the subject, although others are welcome. The specific goals of the course are these:

In pursuing these goals, students will become acquainted with a selection of classic data structures and algorithms. Broader, more technical treatments of these topics, in particular algorithm analysis, are presented in later undergraduate courses.

We use the Racket programming language in our studies. Racket is a dialect of Scheme, a language with a long history in the field of computer science generally and college-level instruction specifically. Specifically, we use the Typed Racket variant of Racket.

Having completed this course, students will be able to use computer programming as a robust and efficient method for analytical problem solving and creative endeavors, and develop a sense of the relationship between computer programming and computer science. Students will discover, in future work, that the experience gained in this course applies to programming generally, in any programming language; that is, CS151 should not be thought of as a course in programming Scheme. Furthermore, students will have gained experience with some best practices in the discipline.

This class meets four times a week: three lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a lab session on Thursday. For the first two weeks, the meetings will be remote using Zoom. The Zoom links for the lectures and labs are posted on Ed (the links for Sections 2 and 3 are also posted on Canvas).

Here is the schedule of office hours; all times are CDT. For now, office hours are being held using Zoom. You can find the Zoom links on Ed.

The course is taught in Typed Racket, which is a statically typed dialect of Scheme. We roughly follow the pedagogy of

While this book is the undisputed primary ancestor of this curriculum, over the years, and as our curriculum has evolved, we have departed from the text to such an extent that we only occasionally refer to it directly. It is a useful reference, however, and a very good book in its own right.

We supplement this text with our own Notes on Typed Racket. This document covers the aspects of the language that we use in this course and includes a style guide for writing good code.

The assignments in this class are all programming assignments, but they come in three different flavors:

Assignments will usually be due at 23:00 (CDT), but you should always be careful to check the due date and time for each assignment.

There will be two in-person exams in this class. The exam will be in the same place and at the same time for all three sections.

In addition, there will be short quizzes at the beginning of most Friday lectures (once we are back in the classroom).

Programming is a challenging activity and students are often faced with problems that they do not know how to solve. If you are stuck, you should ask for help. We provide extensive office hours during the week; but for immediate feedback we use Ed Discussion, which is available from the course Canvas page.

The University has a formal policy on Academic Honesty that you are expected to adhere to. In this section, we elaborate on what we understand by academic honesty, and provide specific rules to ensure that you do not cross the line into academic dishonesty.

Academic dishonesty can encompass many activities, but one of the gravest is plagiarism: knowingly handing in someone else’s work as your own, whether it be work done by another student in the class or available publicly on the Internet. This class has a ZERO TOLERANCE policy on plagiarism. If we determine you committed plagiarism, you will receive an F in the class regardless of how small the offence was. You will also be referred to the Dean of Students in the College for further adjudication. The College may impose further penalties, up to and including suspension and expulsion.

Please note that plagiarism is fairly easy for us to detect: we use a variety of automated tools that look for similarities between your code and other students’ code (across all sections of the class), including code submitted in previous offerings of this class. If you use someone else’s code, it is very likely you will get caught and, to reiterate, you will then automatically receive an F in the class.

Fortunately, avoiding plagiarism is very simple! For the most part, you just need to follow these rules:

We realize that sometimes students commit plagiarism out of desperation and as a measure of last resort. If you are in this situation, please just ask the course staff for help. If you are having a hard time in the class, we will provide as much assistance as we can. Plus, a poor performance in one assignment is unlikely to wreck your grade for the class. Plagiarism is never worth it.

Students often turn to their roommates, friends or paid tutors for help. While you are welcome to ask friends and tutors for help understanding concepts, you should never ask someone outside the course staff for help with on short exercises, programming assignments, or timed assessments. We want to know what you can accomplish, not what your roommate, friend, or tutor can do. If you need help with understanding concepts, deciphering assignments, finding bugs in your code, etc, please consult the course staff. (See help for ways to get help.)

All that said, we believe that student interactions are an important and useful means to mastery of the material. We recommend that you discuss the material in this class with other students, and that includes the homework assignments. So what is the boundary between acceptable collaboration and academic misconduct? First, while it is acceptable to discuss homework, it is not acceptable to turn in someone else’s work as your own. When the time comes to write down your answer, you should write it down yourself from your own memory. Moreover, you should cite any material discussions, or written sources, e.g.,

Using outside sources is generally acceptable as long as:

Some sources may provide small code examples that are used to illustrate a concept. We encourage you to never use those examples verbatim in your code, but we understand that, in some cases, your own code may be reasonably similar to those examples (e.g., because there are very few ways in which a given piece of code could be written). To ensure this is not flagged as plagiarism, always err on the side of including a citation.

If you have any questions about what is or is not proper academic conduct, please ask your instructors.

The Recording and Deletion Policies for the current academic year can be found in the Student Manual under Petitions, Audio & Video Recording on Campus.

We will be using Zoom for many parts of this class. We expect your interactions via Zoom to be consistent with an in-person class experience. Respect the people you are working with. Enter the Zoom meetings muted if possible (unfortunately, it will not be possible if you’re calling in), and unmute to speak. Raise your hand if you would like to speak. [There’s a “Raise Hand” button on the participant page.] If your background is unusually noisy, use the chat channel instead of unmuting. We strongly encourage you to have your camera on during our Zoom sessions, but we will understand if some of you prefer to keep your video off.

Note that you can set your name in your Zoom profile, so you do not have to go with whatever was assigned. Feel free to include your pronouns in your name (if you do, please include them after your last name).

Some of our Zoom recitation meetings may be recorded and saved to the cloud to allow students in this class to review the discussion, and especially to allow students who cannot participate the opportunity to benefit from them. We will not make these recordings available to anyone but class participants, we will not make them available after the quarter, and students will not be allowed to save copies. We have no way to guarantee that students will follow this policy, however. If you have FERPA concerns, please mask yourself accordingly, e.g., by turning off video and using an alias.