by Mike Gleicher on December 4, 2014
We are going to grade Project 2 without in-person demos. We’ll read your description, run your program, and try to figure out what is going on.
One problem with this approach is that if there is something cool in your program that isn’t easy to see, we might miss it. We’ll try to guard against this: your documentation will tell us the “do not miss” sights in your town, and the framework code gives ways to make it easy to see important sights (by have the “goto sights” widget – which you should used!). However, we still might miss things.
So… If you have something in your town that is really cool and you want to make sure we don’t miss it, and it is done “on time” (see the deadline) so its ready to show off, please bring your project to class (either on your laptop, or on a memory stick to run on Adam’s laptop) on Thursday, December 11th. We’ll let people show off their cool “do not miss” features. We may not have time for everyone, but we can hopefully look at a bunch.
Note: you don’t have to turn in your project at this time. Just take 1-2 minutes to show us (and the class) a few cool features of it. We’ll also let people show off features after class as well.
(and this is a reminder: bring your laptop or tablet or smartphone to class on Thursday, December 11th to do course evals, unless you’ve done them already)
by Mike Gleicher on December 4, 2014
Project 2 is due Wednesday, December 10th. As it always has been (since the course calendar at the beginning of the semester).
We will start grading projects sometime on Saturday morning, December 13th. We will download all the projects at that time. If your project isn’t turned in by then, we cannot grade it. If your project is turned in before then, we will grade it without looking at when it was turned in.
There are no late penalties providing you turn the project in before we start grading. If you turn the project in later than that, we won’t grade it.
No, I don’t know what time we’ll start grading on December 13th. But, if I were taking the class, I wouldn’t take any chances (I may wake up early these days): if you turn your project in while the clock still says Friday, you know you’re safe. A little bit after that, probably safe.
by Mike Gleicher on December 3, 2014
In the future, the CS department will be moving to online course evaluations. If you’re in Engineering, you are probably used to this already.
As part of the transition, a few classes are going to try out the new system. Our class is one of them.
In the next few days, you will receive an email with instructions on how to do the survey. You can follow the link and answer the questions any time you want. There’s about a dozen “1-7” answer questions, and a few “type in” boxes. (it’s almost the same form as we use for old-fashioned paper evals).
Just in case you don’t have 10 minutes to fill in the form, we’ll take 10 minutes at the end of class on Thursday, December 11th to let people fill it in. So please bring a laptop or tablet or smartphone or something to class.
by Mike Gleicher on November 28, 2014
Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving!
I also hope that Project 2 is coming along – it’s going to be due next week!
In what little class time we had last week, we started to talk about image processing. This week, we’ll continue that conversation.
If you haven’t read up on image processing, you should do so now. Last week’s readings still stand. The readings are a little more advanced than what we’ll cover in class. But you’ll need to know the basic ideas for the exam.
We won’t have time for a third project for you to do image processing. But you’ll want to make sure that you can do the basics (the exam is coming soon!). So try your hand at Assignment 11. By the way, I posted answers to Assignment 9b.
As far as Project 2, we were going to have a project check point as an assignment. But we’ll just assume that everyone is making good progress. If you aren’t be sure to come to office hours (both Adam and I have office hours this week), or the Project Discussion (Monday, Dec 1, 4:30, room 1240).
So, there is nothing to turn in this week on Wednesday. But make sure you’re keeping up on the work!
The end of the class will be quite compressed. The project will be due on Wednesday, December 10th. The exam is on Sunday, December 14th. This means it will be very difficult for us to accept late projects. We’ll give you handin details soon.
by Mike Gleicher on November 25, 2014
A very astute student (thanks Scott!) found a bug in the GraphicsTown code. It’s actually in the shader utilities that have been in use for years.
The current version removes newlines from the shader program before it compiles them. This means that some things won’t compile correctly (for example, if you have C++ style comments). So, if you have a shader that works in kickjs, but not in GraphicsTown, this might be your problem.
We will provide a better version of the shader tools soon.
UPDATE: Here is a link to the new ShaderTools.cpp file. If you experience shader bugs relating to “//” comments, you can replace the old ShaderTools.cpp with this one.
by Mike Gleicher on November 25, 2014
We will have a discussion for Project 2 ideas on Monday, December 1st, at 4:30pm. It will be in Room 1240 (which is a bit big, but its what was available, and we know it has a decent projector).
Please bring questions. In fact, if you’d like to warn us what those questions will be, please either post them to Piazza or send them by email to both Adam and I.
by Mike Gleicher on November 24, 2014
I have to cancel my office hour on Wednesday, November 26th. I’ll be around in the afternoon if you’d like to make an appointment.
I will have my office hour Tuesday, 11/25, at 2pm.
by Mike Gleicher on November 21, 2014
This is a short week since it’s Thanksgiving. Amazingly, there are just 5 lectures left. 3 weeks from now, we’ll be done – think about that if you’re waiting to start Project 2.
In lecture, we’ll start to learn about image processing. There are readings on image processing, which will be important (there are some hard concepts, so seeing it multiple ways will be important). But, you can read Readings 12 on image processing after Tuesday’s lecture.
You should be making progress on Project 2. For the assignment this week, we just want a brief status report on how you’re doing. Mainly to make you think about it. The assignment is “10a” but I am not going to assign 10b – it will be given out next week as part of assignment 11.
We will probably have some help sessions to talk about project 2.
by Mike Gleicher on November 21, 2014
It was a little tricky to decide how to map grades to exam scores, since there were no clean dividing lines. If you’re on the border, we’ve noted it, and will take that into account when figuring out the final grades. Here are cutoffs (if you get this score or above, you get the corresponding grade):
90:A, 85:AB, 75: B, 74:B?, 69:BC, 60:C, 57:C/D, 50:D
The median grade is a B. A lot of people scored 74 (which is just below the median). We understand that many people do better on projects than exams, and take that into account during grading.
by Mike Gleicher on November 21, 2014
DOIT has installed the variable speed playback option for the mediaspace videos I’ve posted. So you can watch it at 1.5x or 2x speed (probably 1.5x is better – the audio is a little hard to understand at 2x).
I think this should make the tutorial videos more helpful. We’ll probably have more of them in the future.
In particular: if there’s something that you think would be a good topic for a tutorial video (especially some advanced thing you want to try for Project 2), let us know. The tutorial videos are an experiment, and I’m curious what we can do to make them useful.