cs101/instructors_manual.html at master · pythonpad/cs101 · GitHub

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<title>CS101 Instructor's Manual</title>
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<h1>CS101 Instructor's Manual</h1>

<p><em>First draft, June 1, 2011, Otfried Cheong.</em></p>

<h2>General Structure</h2>

<p>CS101 is taken by all KAIST freshmen, with the exception of a few
  who have taken an advanced placement programming course at a 영재학교
  and are exempted. (Students can also take a course waiver exam at
  the beginning of the semester, see below.)</p>

<p>So there are about 500 students every semester taking CS101, which
  is offered in 12 sections, CS101A to CS101L. Students are assigned
  automatically to these sections by the academic affairs office at
  the beginning of the semester.</p>

<p>The main feature of each section is a weekly three hour lab, held
  in a PC-room in the Creative Learning Building.  This lab is
  supervised by a <em>Lead TA</em> (a Ph.D. student), who is assisted
  by 5 to 6 helper TAs (undergraduate and master students).</p>

<p>The labs are run in sync&mdash;all labs in a given week cover
  exactly the same material.  (This means that if there is a holdiday
  in a week, it is easier to cancel labs for the entire week than to
  come up with a make-up scheme.  As a result, we only hold 12 labs
  during the 16 weeks of the semester.)</p>

<p>In addition to the lab, <em>four sections</em> together share one
  lecture given by a CS faculty: CS101ABCD on Monday, CS101EFGH on
  Wednesday, and CS101IJKL on Friday.  The lectures are scheduled from
  13:00 to 15:00, but usually take only 60 to 75 minutes.</p>

<p>Note that the labs for the Wednesday and Friday lectures are held in
  the week <em>following</em> the lecture, while the labs for the
  Monday lecture are held in the <em>same</em> week.  This implies
  that it is best if the lectures are synchronized such that the
  Monday lecture covers the same material as the Wednesday and Friday
  lectures of the previous week.  If the semester starts on a Monday,
  it is best to cancel the first Monday lecture and start the lectures
  on Wednesday.</p>


<h2>Lecturers and teaching assistants</h2>

<p>There are six Ph.D. students assigned as <em>lead TAs</em>, each
handling two lab sections.  One of the lead TAs is the <em>Head
TA</em>, who is actually managing most of the course.  Lead TAs are
paid 800,000 Won for six months, helper TAs 300,000 Won.</p>

<p>The lead TAs together handle the recruiting of helper TAs.  This
happens in the semester break before the semester starts.  One new
feature starting in Fall 2011 is that prospective master students must
provide the consent of their advisor to become a TA.</p>

<p>Three CS faculty volunteer as lecturers for the three lecture
  components of the course.  One of them is the <em>course
  coordinator</em>, who is responsible for the overall logistics
  (mostly overseeing the work of the head TA), and for communication
  with the academic affairs office, the bridge program, the Education
  3.0 team, and all the other lovely KAIST institutions that have an
  interest in freshmen education.  We maintain a schedule of the
  past, current, and future instructors
  <a href="http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/~otfried/cs101/schedule.html">here</a>.</p>

<p>The TAs are responsible for the following tasks:</p>
<ul>
<li>Running labs;</li>
<li>Maintaining the course web server;</li>
<li>Preparing lab materials (although it is better if faculty do
  this, see below);</li>
<li>Setting homework problems and grading the homework;</li>
<li>Setting midterm and final exam problems; running and proctoring
  the exam, and grading it;</li>
<li>Providing an office hour for students to come with questions;</li>
<li>Setting a course-waiver exam; running and proctoring the exam;
  and grading it (see below).</li>
</ul>


<h2>Course contents</h2>

<p>The course teaches basic programming in Python. It requires no
  previous programming knowledge.   The course tries to be <em>very
  gentle</em> at the beginning, introducing programming through the
  controlling of a very simply robot (simulated in a graphical
  environment) called "Hubo", then picking up speed later.  We try to
  do interesting tasks in the lab, with topics in computer graphics,
  animation, photo processing, and data analysis.</p>

<p>You can find an overview of the materials as developed by Otfried
  <a href="http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/~otfried/cs101fall2010/">here</a>.
  The original slides were made
  using <a href="http://ipe7.sourceforge.net">Ipe</a> in PDF format,
  but Sue Moon had some converted to Powerpoint in early 2011, so you
  can use either format.</p>

<p>The course uses the Wing environment for using Python, and a number
  of Python modules to make programming more
  interesting: <a href="http://www.cs1graphics.org/">cs1graphics</a>,
  <em>cs1robots</em>, and <em>cs1media</em> (the two last ones were
  written by Otfried Cheong for the course).</em>

<p>The course does not follow any book closely, and so we do not
  require students to purchase a textbook.  Students who want a book
  are referred to
  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Programming-Introduction-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/1934356271">Practical
  Programming</a> (a cheap Korean translation
  is <a href="http://book.interpark.com/product/BookDisplay.do?_method=Detail&sc.shopNo=0000400000&dispNo=&sc.prdNo=204677684">available</a>),
  or the free on-line
  book <a href="http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html">Think
  Python</a>.  We provide lecture notes for the first three/four labs
  on robot programming, and another set of lecture notes about media
  programming, both written by Otfried Cheong in 2010.</p>


<h2>Course web server</h2>

<p>The TAs maintain a course web server
  at <a href="http://cs101.kaist.ac.kr">cs101.kaist.ac.kr</a>.  The
  server is used for announcements, to publish the course materials,
  as a student question board, to release homeworks, for students to
  upload homeworks, and for TAs to enter and maintain grades.  It
  works very well, I much prefer it to moodle.</p>

<p>All CS101 students must register on the web site at the beginning
  of the semester, so they can access the homeworks and see their
  grades.  Lecturers should also register so they can post messages
  and answer questions on the board, as well as access the score
  statistics.</p>

<h2>Grading</h2>

<p>We have decided not to let the homework and participation scores
  influence the course score, as it caused too many problems with
  cheating and unfairness.  So the current grading policy is this:</p>

<p>CS101 grading consists of two parts: practice and theory.</p>

<p>Practice points are collected as follows:
<ul>
<li>100 points for lecture attendance</li>
<li>100 points for lab work</li>
<li>200 points for homework</li>
</ul>
Students need to collect at least 320 practice points. Students who
missed too many practice points can earn additional practice points
using an extra (bonus) homework at the end of the semester.</p>

<p>Theory points are collected as follows:
<ul>
<li>100 points for midterm exam;</li>
<li>100 points for final exam.</li>
</ul>
The final score for CS101 is determined entirely by the theory points,
(but students who did not earn 320 practice points receive a fail
grade).</p>


<h2>Labs</h2>

<p>By far the most important part of the course is the three hour lab
  every week. Students should actively program during this time, with
  the active help of TAs. TAs should not just stand around passively
  waiting for questions, but should look over student's shoulders and
  steer them in the right direction when needed.</p>

<p>For the success of the course, it is of paramount importance that
  students spend three hours programming every week.  Even then, they
  only get 36 hours of programming experience in total&mdash;we need
  to make the best use of this time!
  In the old Java-based course, the lab time was often filled with the
  TA lecturing, essentially repeating the lecture but in Korean.  The
  lab often ended after an hour or so, and TAs thought about the TA
  job as very easy money.</p>

<p>We need to remind the TAs over and over again that we expect
  students to program for three hours.  It is therefore better that a
  lecturer designs the lab task&mdash;if a TA does this, the
  temptation is too strong to just make one or two tasks, and let the
  lab end when all students are finished or have given up, with TAs
  going home early.  We need to make it clear to TAs at the beginning
  of the semester, and repeat it during the semester, that we expect
  the lab to last for three hours every single week.  When I create
  lab tasks, I make lots of small tasks, in fact too many for all but
  the very best students to finish in the allocated time.  It needs to
  be made clear to students that failing to finish all tasks is not
  failure, and for some students even completing the first one or two
  tasks without too much help is a real achievement. (At this point
  students will learn that programmer productivity can easily vary by
  a factor of ten or so.)</p>

<p>You can find the lab tasks I created for the first iteration of the
  course <a href="http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/~otfried/cs101spring2010/slides.html">here</a>
  (some of these tasks are no longer appropriate, for instance we no
  longer cover dictionaries, but this gives you an idea of the amount
  of material to fill one lab).</p>

<p>We use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming">Pair
    Programming</a> in the labs.  First, it seems to be helpful for
  many beginning programmers to work in a pair.  Second, we often
  face the situation that we do not have enough working PCs to
  provide one to each student.  (The CLB PC-labs are not very well
  maintained, some PCs are unusably slow or just broken.)   Of course
  the danger is that some students take a free ride and let their
  partner do all the programming, so the TAs check that pairs switch
  roles regularly.</p>

<p>During the lab, students need to get checked by a TA after they
  have completed some task.  The challenge here is to make sure that
  students continue doing the remaining tasks and do not just leave
  after getting their checkmark.</p>


<h2>Homeworks</h2>

<p>We traditionally give about four homeworks during the course.
  Students are expected to finish them at home, with a deadline of
  about two weeks, and on-line submission.</p>

<p>The homeworks have been problematic.  In 2010, about 100 students
  were caught copying or letting copy on the last homework.  Of course
  this implies that they have been copying the earlier homeworks, too,
  but those were typically so easy that there was really only one
  standard answer, and it was impossible to catch copying.</p>

<p>To me, this indicates that many students have genuine difficulty
  doing the homework task.  I had quite a number of students in my
  class who came to my office with their laptop because they didn't
  know how to proceed.</p>

<p>My suggestion would be to get rid of homeworks altogether.  If
  students genuinly work for three hours in every lab, then they learn
  more in this supervised setting than in a homework where they get
  stuck.  We could introduce one or two "task labs", where students
  get set a task more formally that they need to complete in pairs.
  They would have TAs around that would help them to the task.
  TAs tend to think that homeworks are there to evaluate the
  students.  That is of course all wrong.  Homeworks are part of the
  learning experience!  We are currently using a lot of TA resources
  on grading homeworks and trying to catch cheaters. By getting rid of
  homeworks, we could allocate the freed resources to provide separate
  small-group labs to students who need extra help, such as students
  from normal high-schools.</p>


<h2>Course waiver exam</h2>

<p>At the beginning of the semester, there is a <em>course waiver
  exam</em>, also called <em>pass exam</em>.  This exam is officially
  administered by the academic affairs office, and students need to
  register for it (and pay 10,000 Won registration fee).</p>

<p>In the past, our waiver exam consisted of 90 minutes of written
  exam, similar in style to the CS101 final exam, and 90 minutes of
  programming exam that had to be done in Python. The exam is graded,
  and the grades are released to the students.  If the grade is B- or
  better, students can chose if they want to take this grade as their
  CS101 course grade (instead of taking the course).</p>

<p>In Spring 2011, two students took the exam and got an A-, and
  decided to take the course instead.  The problem was that even
  though they could program well, they were not that familiar with
  Python and the type of questions we asked in the written exam.</p>

<p>The purpose of the course waiver exam is to allow students who can
  already program on the level taught in CS101 to forego the
  course. In a discussion Sue Moon, Kwangmoo Choe, Taisook Han, and
  Otfried Cheong had on March 9, 2011, we suggested that it might be
  better to really just test programming skill:  the exam would consist
  of a task and two hours to write a program to solve this task in
  either Python, Java, C, or C++ (other languages can be added if
  grading can be ensured).  No written exam is necessary if students
  can do this.</p>

<p>We might also try to convince the academic affairs office to be
  allowed to grade the waiver exam Pass/Fail.</p>


<h2>Bridge program</h2>

<h3>Background</h3>

<p>The bridge program (BP) is meant for students at normal (non-science)
high schools that have been accepted to KAIST and will enter KAIST in
the next spring.  It is meant to prepare them for KAIST by
<ul>
<li>getting them exposed to lectures and course materials in English</li>
<li>improving their background knowledge, so that they are not left
  behind in the first semester</li>
</ul>
The bridge program is offered at least by physics, math, and
chemistry.  In some cases (e.g. math) it is actually taught as a real
course at KAIST, which is taken by foreign students during their first
semester at KAIST to improve their background, and which is recorded
and taught to the high school students.</p>

<h3>The case of CS101</h3>

<p>On Monday, May 30, 2011, Sukyoung Ryu, In-Young Ko, and Otfried Cheong
had a meeting concerning the bridge program for CS101.  Here is a
short summary of our thoughts about this.</p>

<p>Unlike freshman math, physics, and chemistry courses, the freshman
programming course CS101 offered by our department starts from zero.
It assumes no prior programming knowledge, and in fact limited
computer exposure.</p>

<p>This means that "improving background knowledge" does not apply to
CS101. There are many students from <em>science high schools</em> who come to
KAIST <em>without</em> any programming experience.  It would be strange to
suggest to normal-high school students to take a preparatory
programming course but not to offer this to science high school
students.</p>

<p>One does not learn programming from lectures, but by doing it in
front of a computer.  We provide an interactive environment in the
CS101 labs, where TAs are available to help students set up their
computers, install Python and the necessary libraries, and take them
through their first programming steps.</p>

<p>We believe that this is absolute essential for a positive learning
experience, and we do not know how we could provide this remotely to
students at high schools throughout the country.  Many students have
difficulties with the most elementary steps at the beginning.</p>

<p>For these two reasons, we do not believe it to be effective to
offer such a course.</p>

<p>However, it is true that students from normal highschools often
have difficulties keeping up with the learning curve during CS101.  On
average, they need more time and more help than students from science
high schools.  It would be helpful if the means provided for the BP
could be used to recruit additional TAs to tutor these students in
smaller groups.</p>

<p>In addition, the first semester is too packed, and students who get
a bit behind do not have enough free time to study and catch up.  It
would be useful to offer a gentler slope with less concentrated
coursework to some students, for instance by offering one or two
courses during the summer break of the freshman year.</p>

<h2>Policies</h2>

<h3>Cheating</h3>

<p>Officially, the penalty for cheating is an F on the course.  In
  practice, this wasn't enforced in the past (I don't know about this
  semester).  In fall 2011, when 100 students were caught cheating on
  the homework, we gave them zero points for the homework and
  downgraded their final course score by one unit (so A+ became
  A0&mdash;this actually happened, since we also penalized the one who
  allowed the copying).</p>

<h3>Retaking CS101</h3>

<p>KAIST policy does not allow students to get a grade better than B+
  when retaking a course, but this policy applies only to 2007학번 and
  later. In CS101, we apply this policy to <em>all</em>
  students&mdash;you cannot get a grade better than B+ if you retake
  CS101. The grace period for the old students is over.</p>

<p>In the past, we often had students who were EE, CS, or IE majors in
  their last year, who had already taken advanced courses involving
  programming, and who simply wanted to retake CS101 to replace a bad
  grade they got in their freshman year by a better grade to improve
  their overall GPA.  There is absolutely no justification for
  allowing that.  We are already tight on capacity, we can't waste it
  on students where it has no educational value at all.  Worse, those
  student depress the freshmen because they know everything in the
  class and the lab, and give lecturers and TAs the wrong impression
  on how students are progressing.  These students also didn't realize
  that they are shooting themselves in the foot: An employer or
  graduate school can immediately see from the transcript that they
  retook an easy beginner course in their last year.  Who wants to
  hire somebody who likes to play tricks like this, and who clearly
  worries more about appearance than about substance?  It actually
  devalues the other grades on the transcript, because you start
  wondering what other tricks the student may have played to get good
  scores.</p>

<p>In 2010, Otfried Cheong instituted a policy that students who were
  already registered with an IT-related major (defined as being part
  of the IT college) could <em>not</em> retake CS101 if they had
  already passed it.  In 2011, Sue Moon amended this policy to allow
  students to retake after a face-to-face meeting with her.</p>

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