Each week, you are expected to learn the material scheduled for the week. The lectures will be pre-recorded, but the nominal class time is Thursday 2-4, and Thursday 4pm each week should be your target for working through the material. The material is offered in the following formats.
- Online book
- The book ("tutorial") is available (for free) here.
- Slides
- Slides will be linked from the schedule page.
- Lectures
- Pre-recorded lectures, which will be linked from the schedule page.
- Problems in the book
- Each section in the book has a page of exercises. Each week, you should work through the exercises for the pages covered that week.
- Tutorial
- Every week (including the first week of class) the TA will hold an online tutorial Thursday 4pm-5pm. I will assign problems specifically for each tutorial. (There will be a link from the schedule page.) During each tutorial, you will solve these problems. The TA will give you some guidance, if necessary, but you will be expected to actively solve the problems during the tutorial. (You will not be expected to have tried to do the problems before the tutorial.)
- Homework
- Every week, I will assign homework problems, which will be due on Tuesday at 5pm. You will get 2 points for each completed homework you submit by this deadline; if you submit a completed homework after the deadline but before Wednesday at 5pm, you will get 1 point. (There will be no exceptions to these deadlines, for any reason.) Homework is "completed" if you answer every question and show how you obtained your answers; simply stating an answer is not sufficient. I will post answers to the homework each Thursday. The homeworks will be linked from the schedule page, which will also have information about how to submit them. (See the evaluation page for information about how your mark in the course will be determined.)
- Term tests
- There will be a 40-minute term test every second week. For details, see the schedule page and the evaluation page. Some of the problems on the tests and final assessment will be similar to exercises in the book, to tutorial exercises, and to homework exercises.
- Final assessment
- See the evaluation page.
To learn the material, use whatever combination of these formats works for you.
The only way to master the material in this course, like other technical material, is to do lots of exercises. Just as you cannot read a manual about a programming language and then expect to be able to write a perfect program without any practice, you cannot expect to master the material in this course without putting it to work by doing exercises. So after you go through the relevant sections of the book, the slides, and/or the lectures for the week, you should put the material to work by engaging in the following activities.