Exam -- new!

Timetable

The supplementary lectures are intended for students new to the School of Computer Science, such as: E&SE students, direct entry students, or "occasional" students. The lectures will assume you have knowledge of another programming language, such as C or C++, and will constitute a fast introduction to Java. These lectures are not intended for students who took the first-year Java course. However, students who took the first-year Java course and gained less than 50% may attend, if they wish.

Teaching team

Questions?

• You can ask the lecturer, after the lectures or by email: M.D.Ryan at cs.bham.ac.uk
  Be aware, however, that I am not normally able to answer emails quickly.
  
• You can ask Andy Brown, the teaching assistant, in the labs or by email: A.J.Brown at cs.bham.ac.uk
• You can ask the demonstrators in the labs.

Labs

Assessment

Continuously assessed exercises

• Predictive Text, in which you will write a program which exhibits similar behaviour to the predictive text system for entering text on a mobile phone.
• Route Finder, where your program enables the user to plan routes between cities on the train network. The program interfaces with a database, and can be used over the web.
• Tiles Game. The Tiles Game is a program which lets the user slide 15 tiles around a 4x4 grid in order to put them back in the right order.
  

You will see that, within each exercise, the first few parts are very easy and carry quite a large proportion of the marks. This is to enable relatively inexperienced programmers to pass. The later parts of the exercises are often very difficult. This is to ensure that more experienced programmers are appropriately challenged. You will also notice that, as the term progresses, the exercises become more difficult. It is well worth making sure you gain as many marks as you can on the first two, because you will find the last two more difficult.

Lab book. Please buy yourself an appropriate lab book, preferably hard-backed and size A4. Use this to write your design notes and thoughts, and have it available so that demonstrators can see it and write in it if they need to explain things to you.

Each exercise receives marks for

• Design: the marker will look at your design, including your choice of classes, the relationships between them, information flow, coupling and cohesion.
  
• Coding: marks will be given for your choice of data structures, your use of the Java API, code indentation, choice of variable names, coding style.
  
• Testing: how have you established whether your code exhibits the desired behaviour? Pay attention to boundary and exceptional cases (e.g., null input; incorrect input) as well as the expected cases.

To gain credit for the exercises, you must submit your design notes and your code electronically, and have a viva in the labs. It is not enough only to have a viva, or only to submit electronically.

Electronic submission

Under unix

/home/students/submit/java2/<exName>/<loginID>/

/home/students/submit/java2/PredText/ug12abc/

You should also make sure that your files are readable by me. If you create any subdirectories of these directories, please make sure they are readable too. Since the directory named after your login id is unreadable by anyone besides you and me, you can make the files within the directory world-readable; the permissions on the directory mean that only you and me can read them. Run chmod -R ugo+rx * in that directory.

For this example, then, you would run these commands:

cp design.txt *.java *.class /home/students/submit/java2/PredText/ug12abc/
chmod -R ugo+rx /home/students/submit/java2/PredText/ug12abc/*

Under Windows

Plagiarism

Getting the viva

You can have a viva only after you have submitted your code. During the viva, you will demonstrate your working program. The assessor will want to see the source code as well as the working program. You should work from the directory you have submitted to, e.g. /home/students/submit/java2/PredText/ug12abc/. The demonstrator will note the date and time of the viva, and you should not change your code after you have had the viva.

Before your viva begins, you should fill in a viva form. You are asked to declare what marks you consider you should get for each section of the form, by writing in the mark. You are ready for your viva when you have filled in the form. The demonstrator assessor will ask you to demonstrate various aspects of your program. He or she will also ask you to explain various aspects of the code.

You should only take a viva once you are completely finished coding their exercise. The excercise need not be complete, but it must be finished to your expectation. If you have any question concerning submission, your work or assessment, do this prior to taking a viva. The demonstrator will assess the work on an 'as-is' basis. No marks will be awarded for compoments that do not work or have not been implemented, although partial marks may be awarded for attempted work.

It is your responsibility to make sure the program performs as expected on the machine it is presented on. If there are any problems with porting your application, these should be addressed prior to any viva, not during it. If your program has known bugs, it is better to let the demonstrator know about this at the beginning of the viva. If such errors are encountered during testing, it looks bad and the loss of marks may be greater.

Only have the files directly related to your assignment on the screen (e.g. Java, design, javadoc). Close any other windows. If you are using NetBeans, make sure only the relevant directory structure is mounted in NetBeans. Make sure you are able to present any component of the assignment when requested to do so.

The code you present should be the one you submitted prior to the viva.  The demonstrator can not award marks for extra functionality that may be found in the submitted code yet not in the one presented during the viva

Vivas give students the chance to present their work efficiently. It is an important skill to be able to communicate your work and doing vivas in one way of improving this skill. It helps us to fully understand your program and to award the maximum number of marks possible. As there are many students, it is imperative that vivas run smoothly.

Week by week plan

Week beginning	Lecture content	Exercises	Viva
27 September 2004	NO LECTURES	Predictive Text
4 October	Java basics reminder: Strings, command-line arguments, imput from files. Intro to PredText exercise.	Predictive Text
11 October	Data structures for predictive text Model-View-Controller architecture	Predictive text
18 October	Notes from Horstmann, Big Java: Designing classes What should you put in your design doc Start RouteFinder	PredText	Predictive Text viva during week beginning 18 October deadline: 22 October
25 October	Intro to RouteFinder. Databases. Route finding algorithms.	Route finder
1 November	RouteFinder will have been updated Explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm Examples of trains tableau	Route finder
8 November	Servlets tutorial by Alan Sexton Developing servlets with Netbeans	Route finder
15 November	Tiles game Horstmann, Big Java: Notes on GUIs	Tiles game	Route finder viva week 15 Nov deadline: 19 Nov
22 November	Event handling More on GUIs Tiles Game: Making Moves, User Intrf.	Tiles game
29 November	Tiles game - the suggested image processing code has changed Solvability of the tiles game
6 December	No Lecture. There will be individual meetings with selected students instead.		Tiles game viva week 6 December deadline: 10

Demonstrator schedule

Answers and marks

Answers and comments

• Predictive Text. As of 2009, these are not available (in order to allow re-use of the exercise.)
• Route Finder. (If this link doesn't work, you can ask me to re-instate it. (I had to temporarily change the permissions)
  
• Tiles Game. Solutions by two people are provided.
• Simon Hall's solution addresses all parts of the exercise. However, it uses a pre-JDK1.4 method to load images, which is outdated. Images can be loaded in a nicer way, as done in Aidan Harding's solution below.
• Aidan Harding's solution address only part 3 of the exercise. However, it uses the nice image loading methods, and it also uses JUnit to test the solution in a modular fashion.
  

Marks

• Marks for continuous assessment
• Marks for whole module (exam + cts ass)