Basic Info

You are not required to purchase books for this class.

All required readings will be provided online. Some of the readings are provided under academic fair use, and are only for students in the class. For this reason, they will be provided via the course Canvas page.

In the past, we used readings more extensively.

The course staff is available to provide help!

In this class you are expected to uphold standards of professional conduct and academic integrity. The University policies on academic misconduct apply to this class.

Proper academic conduct means being honest about your work and being respectful in your communications with staff and other students. It means not presenting the work of others as your own. It means not collaborating on parts of class we ask you not to collaborate on.

1. Grading is based on the 10 workbooks (64%), the final “project” (12%), and the exams (24%).
2. We will consider quizzes/surveys and various forms of participation to adjust your grade.
3. Do not expect Canvas to compute your grade.

Pre-Requisites: what you need to know before taking this class.

Officially the prerequisites are:

(MATH 222 or MATH 276) and (COMP SCI 367 or 400) or graduate/professional standing or declared in the Capstone Certificate in Computer Sciences for Professionals

The Programming requirements

We require CS400. Not necessarily because we want all the specific things they teach you in the class, but rather, we expect you to be a mature enough programmer that you can write non-trivial programs. You should be comfortable enough with programming that learning a new language or picking up a new development environment isn’t such a big deal.

Programming assignments in CS559 will use the Javascript programming language. We will help you learn Javascript, if you aren’t already familiar with it.

I prefer to let Canvas provide the course calendar, since it can keep things up to date.

You can look at the Canvas Calendar and Canvas Summary (calendar list). A warning, these don’t seem to show the Zoom events (look at the Canvas Zoom List for that).

The Weekly Rhythm

• On Tuesday: during the class period (9:30-10:45) we will have a synchronous lecture that introduces the week’s topic. See Lectures.
• On Tuesday: we will release the week’s workbook. The workbook has readings and programming assignments. See Workbooks. The schedule is changed a bit around exam weeks, and the schedule is off a little bit for break and the final project.
• On two of the Wednesdays (March 8, April 26) we will have exams. See Exams.
• On Thursday: during the class period (9:30-10:45) we will have a synchronous lecture. See Lectures.
• On Friday: there will be a survey (quiz) that you can take any time during the day. See Policies (surveys).
• On Monday: the workbook is due. See Workbooks.

The Weeks / Topics

Tuesday’s date is given

Here is a brief overview of what the class is and how it works. You may also want to see the Getting Started page.

Because this class is online, you will need to provide your own equipment for class. The requirements aren’t much different than any other class. You’ll need a capable computer, a decent internet connection, a camera, and the ability to do audio and video for communications.

We recommend using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) for doing the programming assignments in CS559.

You will need to use some text editor for editing JavaScript programs and web pages (e.g., html and css files).

It is worth investing your time in learning to use good tools (like VSCode).

Workbooks are the main assignments for class and the required reading. Understanding them is realy important.