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CSE 163

Introduction & Syllabus

Suh Young Choi

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Agenda

Overview

What is this class? Who is taking this class?

Who are we?
Syllabus
Introduction to course tools

Course website – stay tuned for this!
Ed

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Overview

What is this class?

Competencies

More advanced programming concepts than in CSE 142 or CSE 160 including how to write bigger programs with multiple classes and modules.�
How to work with different types of data: tabular, text, images, geo-spatial, etc.�
Ecosystem of data science tools including Jupyter Notebook and various data science libraries including scikit-image, scikit-learn, and pandas data frames.�
Basic concepts related to code complexity, efficiency of different types of data structures, and memory management.

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Overview

Who is taking this class?

This class is designed to have students from

122: Know control structures, file I/O, arrays in Java

Will spend first weeks learning 122 in Python fast!
Practice is KEY!�

160: Know control structures, file I/O, data structures in Python

First week will be review while everyone learns Python�

123/143 or Beyond: Seen more advanced programming in Java

Class material should be complementary to what you would have learned in 123/143
Competency 1 is aimed at the 123/143 level of programming

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Who am I?

Suh Young Choi (she/her)

not Suh! ☺

Fresh UW Grad!
Office Hours

Time:

Wednesdays 2:30-4:30pm
Location: CSE 216
Or by appointment!

Contact

Personal Matters: atobdura@cs.washington.edu
Course Content + Logistics: Ed

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Our TAs!

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Max Bi�mbi6245@uw.edu

Murtaza Ali�mali53@uw.edu

Vibhav Peri�vperi@uw.edu

Elizabeth Bui�kaitebui@uw.edu

Sheamin Kim

sheakim2@uw.edu

Jainaba Jawara�jainaba5@uw.edu

Karen Velderrain-Lopez�karenv16@uw.edu

Vatsal Chandel�vatsac@uw.edu

AA (12:00)

AB (1:10)

AC (2:20)

Logistics +�Office Hours

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Syllabus

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Bicycles?

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Prepare:

Read lesson

Attend:

Class Session

Mon

Nothing 😢

Tue

Prepare:

Read lesson

Attend:

Class Session

Wed

Attend:

Quiz Section

Thur

Prepare:

Read lesson

Attend:

Class Session

Fri

Lesson Due��Next CP Released

Next THA Released

�

Current THA+LR Due��

We don’t record attendance in lecture/section, but attending these sessions is expected
There are recordings of the class sessions, but the content comes from the lesson.

Lesson Due

CP Due

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Class Sessions

Recap material from readings.��Most of time spent in small groups working on the practice problems from the lesson. Emphasis on learn by doing.��On the road to mastery!

Lessons

First introduction to material.��No where near mastery yet!

Sections

Practice material covered in 3/4 in a context where a TA can help you.�� Most of the time is spent with you working in groups! ��The emphasis is still on you learning by doing.

Assessments

With the scaffolding from 1 and 2, you are probably now capable to tackle the checkpoints and take-home assessments!. These will be complex and challenging, but you’ll continue to learn by doing.

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3

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Pacing

Even though the class is asynchronous, your peers and the TAs are not so we are releasing the lessons and assessments as we move throughout the quarter

As a general note: Interacting compassionately and empathetically is key!

Community is not built by me, it is built by you! We need you to participate in the active classroom environment. This means

Attend class sessions and quiz sections when you can
Participate in discussions on Ed Discussion and chat
Reach out to your peers and the course staff when you need help!

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Assessments�and Grading

Our goal in the course is for you to master the concepts and skills we teach.

We assess your mastery by asking you to apply concepts and skills on tasks or problems. By necessity, we are assessing your work as a proxy for your mastery

Your final grade should reflect the extent to which you have demonstrated mastery of the course objectives

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Assessments

We will have the following assessments in CSE 163:

Checkpoints (weekly)

Short assignments consisting of a few problems to assess your learning on that week’s content.

Learning Reflections (weekly)

Create study notes to reflect on what was covered last week.

Take-home assessments (mostly weekly)

Longer programming assignments.

Final Project (parts throughout quarter)

Create something new that you want to share!

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In CSE 163, you will have four main types of assessments. Checkpoints are short assignments with a couple of quiz problems and/or a coding challenge and they are usually due on Mondays, unless it is a holiday, which happens for July 4th, and that one will be due on Tuesday that week. So by the end of next Monday, you will be expected to turn in checkpoint 0 covering what you have learned on Wednesday and Friday. They are a good starting point for checking your understanding.
Learning reflections are also due weekly, but on Thursdays, and they are usually compose of a couple of check-in questions and a learning summary of what you have learned in the past week. We recommend you to work on writing the learning summary or the study notes as you are working through the lessons during the week as a way to reinforce your understanding and come up with questions on the lesson materials. We will have a clear guideline on what topics we are expecting you to include on those notes just to ensure there is a certain quality standard and can actually be useful reference for you later on.
Take-home assessments are longer programming assignments with a bigger scope, and we encourage you to complete the checkpoints and learning reflections first before working on them, so you can have a quick assessment on your own mastery of the material and review the concepts before diving into the bigger projects.
Finally, we also have a final project, which is for you to complete a data science project on something that you are interested in. You will be able to work in groups of up to three people, and we have smaller parts throughout the quarter to keep you on track, but I will not talk too much about the details project logistics until later. Just know that we don’t have a final exam, but you do need to complete the final project.

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Grading

Checkpoints and Learning Reflections are graded on an S (Satisfactory) or N (Not yet) scale
Take-home assessments are graded on an E (Exemplary), S (Satisfactory), or N (Not yet) on 4 dimensions:

Behavior
Concepts
Quality
Testing/Writeup

Final project will be graded on an 8 point scale.

Course grades are determined based on the amount of work that demonstrates mastery at each of these levels. See syllabus for more.

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Aside from the course structure, we are also using a slightly different grading scale than most of other courses, in the sense that we avoid using points for grading most of the things in this class. Instead, we are using E, S, N, and U to represent the different levels of mastery. The intention is for you to shift attention away from the small point differences that are not that meaningful to how well you actually master the content. If you come from some recent offerings of CSE 142, you might already have exposure to this type of mastery grading, but if not, don’t worry too much about it since we have all the details in the syllabus.
The checkpoints and parts of final project are graded on S or N only, or essentially pass/fail, but for the checkpoints, you can resubmit as many times as you want before they are due, and we have autograders that give you immediate feedback on whether you get the problems correct or not.
The learning reflections and take-home assessments are graded on ESNU. Those will be graded manually by the TAs. The learning reflections are relatively straightforward, since you will get either E/S/N/U based on how well you satisfy our requirements in the spec, but the take-home assessments are a bit more complicated.
For each take-home assessment, you will be evaluated on four dimensions. Behavior, which is how much your code pass our tests and produce the expected behavior. Concepts, which involves how well you demonstrate understanding of the Python language and library features and how efficient your code is. Quality, which looks at your code quality, whether you follow our code quality guide and write good documentation for your code. And finally, testing or writeup, depending on the week. For some weeks, we will ask you to write tests for your code, and some other weeks you will submit a writeup responding to some open-ended questions instead. We will talk about those more later. You will receive one of the marks in each of this dimensions, E, S, N, or U, so this combination of four letters would be your grade for the overall take-home assessment. This translates to a somewhat complicated system for counting up the total numbers of E/S/N/Us and map them to a final grade.
Note, one common complaints of this system is that it is a bit complicated, and some students have complained about not being able to predict their performance using this system. However, the truth is that even with points and percentages, you still cannot predict how you do in the future because they are only data from the past. Our syllabus have clearly outline the minimum guarantees for earning each levels of GPA, so if you are aiming to earn a 3.5 GPA at the end, you should use the counts there as a reference on how many Es and Ss you need to guarantee that GPA.
One common question is that if you miss those minimum guarantees, does it mean that you cannot earn that grade. The answer is no, you could still earn it, but there is no guarantee on what grade you end up with. It is just a minimum guarantee, so it doesn’t dictate what your maximum grade could be.
The final project is the only thing that we will be grading on a scale of 8 points. We decided to use points there because we have more dimensions that we want to assess on for this larger-scale project, but we will talk more about how the grading works when we get there.

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Resubmission

Learning is a challenging process that takes time; it doesn’t always happen on your first try.

One previous take-home assessment can be resubmitted each week.

Must be accompanied by write up explaining changes
Grade on resubmission replaces original grade

To stay on-track with the course, each take-home assessment can only be resubmitted within two weeks of receiving feedback.

If you find an unforeseen circumstance that causes you to fall behind on an assignment, please reach out to the course staff sooner than later.

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Resubmission�Example

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Sun	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	Jul 1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22

Gold: Initial submission window

Teal: First round of feedback

Red: Resubmission window (due dates as triangles)

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Late Work

Late work will generally only be accepted with one of the mechanisms outlined in the syllabus.

If you can’t finish a take-home assessment by the initial submission date, you will need to use a resubmission in a future week to turn it in.
Checkpoints are generally not accepted late unless you have sufficient Checkpoint Tokens.

Checkpoint Tokens: A single token lets you turn in 1 checkpoint late at any point in the quarter before the Friday of finals week.

Every student will start with 1 Checkpoint Token
Every 6 Lessons you complete on-time (by 11:59 pm the day of the Lesson), get converted to a Checkpoint Token.

Includes one free Lesson completion for the�Juneteenth holiday

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Collaboration Policy

Form study groups (you can use Ed/Canvas chat for this)! You are encouraged to discuss assessments and concepts at a high level

If you have code in front of you in your discussion or showing each other solutions, probably NOT high level
If you discuss your ideas with others, you must cite them

All code and answers submitted must be your own
Any work found to not be your own will receive a grade of a U and may not be resubmitted

If it’s not your work, we can’t assess your mastery

Final project can be done in groups of up to 3 (not more!)

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Amnesty

Sometimes, we make bad choices that we regret

“If you submit work that is in violation of the academic conduct policy, you bring the action to Suh Young’s attention within 72 hours of submission and request amnesty. If you do so, you will receive a grade of U for the initial submission, but you will be allowed to resubmit your work under the normal resubmission process.”

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Project

Culmination of all the things you learned in this class.�
Open ended project where you find and use real-world datasets to answer an interesting question. Encouraged to work in groups of 2 or 3 other students!

Broken into various checkpoints throughout quarter:

Find some possible ideas for datasets and questions
Pick a research question and your datasets + �find a partner(s)
Outline methodology and define work plan
Gather results and write final report

Final Project presentations will a poster session during our scheduled exam slot

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Technology�Resources

Course website: https://cs.uw.edu/163

Everything you need is linked from here!
Check the calendar for all links for that day

Ed: https://edstem.org/us/courses/32015/discussion/
For discussion board, lessons, checkpoints, and take home assessments
Canvas for a gradebook
MyDigitalHand for office hours

More to come, but we will introduce them as necessary

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Before Next Time

Post questions on syllabus on Ed
Post your intro video on Ed
Complete the Lesson 1 on Ed

Read lesson slides. Stop after completing “Pause and Think”
Encouraged to save problems for class session!
Due for EC @ 11:59 pm Wed 6/21

Next Time

Syllabus & course policy Q&A
More practice with Ed
Python Crash Course

How to write a program
Loops
Conditionals
Functions, parameters, returns

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