Late Submission  No extensions will be granted without an approved application for Special Consideration. There will be a deduction of 10% of the total available marks made from the total awarded mark for each 24 hour period or part thereof that the submission is late. For example, 25 hours late in submission for an assignment worth 10 marks – 20% penalty or 2 marks deducted from the total.  No submission will be accepted after solutions have been posted.

CLASSES

Each week of COMP115 has three hours of lectures and a two-hour practical class. For details of days, times and rooms, consult the University timetables webpage (http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au). The Day and Evening streams of COMP115 have the same content. Practical classes commence in Week 1 and are held in the E6A Computer Laboratories.

REQUIRED AND RECOMMENDED TEXTS AND/OR MATERIALS

• Software Technology: Programming
• Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction, Daniel Shiffman, Morgan Kaufmann, 2nd edition, 2015

The course is built around material in these books and it will be extremely difficult to successfully complete this unit without reading the relevant chapters. These texts is the primary sources of examinable material in this unit. Furthermore, you will find the lecture material much easier to understand if you read the textbooks in advance of the lectures. The lecture schedule below lists the relevant sections of the textbooks.

The textbook website at http://www.learningprocessing.com/ provides supplementary material that you may find useful, including tutorials on Processing, the complete code for the examples in the book, and related downloads. The Macquarie University library has a number of copies of the textbook, including some in the reserve collection. The library also has many other books on programming that you may find useful if the concepts are not adequately explained by the textbook or class material.

UNIT WEBPAGE AND TECHNOLOGY USED AND REQUIRED

Web Home Page

COMP1000 will make extensive use of the iLearn course management system, including for delivery of class materials, discussion boards, online self-tests, submission of work and access to marks and feedback. Students should check the iLearn site (https://ilearn.mq.edu.au) regularly for unit updates.

Questions and general queries regarding the content of this unit, its lectures or practical classes, or its assessments should be posted to the discussion boards on the COMP100 iLearn site. In particular, any questions which are of interest to all students in this unit should be posted to one of these discussion boards, so that everyone can benefit from the answers. Questions of a private nature should be directed to the unit teaching staff.

echo360

Any audio and screen video recordings of the lectures in the Day and Evening streams will be made available online at iLearn via the echo360 system.

Technology Used and Required

The practical work in this unit involves programming in the Processing language (http://processing.org) which will give students experience with features that are used in many modern programming languages. The Processing software can be downloaded free of charge for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X computers from the Processing web site. It is also installed in the 9WW Computer Laboratories.

Unit Schedule

The unit is broken into six modules

1. Foundations of Programming (FP)
2. Variables and Conditionals (V&C)
3. Loops (L)
4. Functions (F)
5. Compound Data (CD)
6. Program Design and Problem Solving (PD&PS)

All but the first and last modules (V&C, L, F, CD) cover one skill which is absolutely necessary to program a computer.  Thus all students must demonstrate a satisfactory performance in each of these modules to pass the course.  Satisfactory performance in a module is defined in the assessment tasks section.  The first and final modules (FP, PD&PS) introduce then synthesise the skills learned in the other modules.  Student performance in these module is important to their final grade and to demonstrate they have reached the level of mastery required to pass, but less than satisfactory performance in these modules does not preclude a student from passing (as it does for the other modules).