2. Course Format

The course in given in two parts. First part consists of lectures, discussion sections and individual assignments. Second part is a group project. Course will also have a take home exam which students take towards the end of the course.

2.1. First Part - Weekly format

The first part lasts the first 4-5 weeks of the course. In this part we will have three sessions per week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and two deadline times per week (Tue 23.55 and Sun 23.55).

The week schedule is as follows. On Mondays, we will introduce a new topic in a lecture like session. We continue to work on the topic on Wednesday, when students have read an article about the topic (see below). Sessions on Wednesday is more relaxed and consist of discussion, group work, etc.. Friday’s sessions are meant to be workshop-like sessions where students can work on their weekly exercises (see below). None of the sessions are compulsory, however, you will get course points from attending Wednesday’s sessions.

Each week we will have two kinds of assignments: A short essay from an article, and a set of other assignments. Although the articles are also on the course website, all the assignments are published in this documentation. Assignments are returned through Moodle (see Assignments).

Each week, Students read a short original article and write a short essay of the article summarizing its main points in pdf format. The hard limit for the essay length is 250 words, however, 150-200 words should be sufficient. Check your word counts! Article deadlines are each week on Tuesdays 23.55 (excluding the first week when the deadline is on Thursday 23.55), and the article for the next week is revealed latest on the previous week’s Wednesday.

Other assignments consist of programming, mathematical and other practical work. Their deadline is on Sunday 23.55 every week, and they are revealed latest on Monday of the same week. These exercises should be returned as a compressed file (zip, tar.gz) that extracts to a folder containing the exercise code and other documentation. The folder has to be named with your UH username! If there is any possibility for misinterpretation, add a README file explaining the file(s) associated with each exercise.

Following, is the coarse explanation for the weekly schedule:

Event	Agenda	Format
Mon: Session	Introduce a new topic.	lecture
Tue 23.55: DL	Article essay due.	pdf, return in Moodle
Wed: Session	Deepen the understanding of the topic.	discussion about the article, group work, etc.
Fri: Workshop	Work on the exercises for the topic.	workshop
Sun 23.55: DL	Other exercises due.	zip, tar.gz, return in Moodle

2.2. Second Part - Group Projects

Note

Exact details of the group project will be revealed later. However, you can assume that a group is 3-4 persons, and a single person is not a group.

The second part consists of group projects and covers the rest of the course. In the second part, there is a weekly meeting where the groups present their work so far and on the last week there is a demo session which is compulsory for all the students. The demo session date is fixed later, but a good alternative is Friday 16.12. 14-16.

2.3. Take Home Exam

Note

Details to be revealed towards the end of the course.

2.4. Grading

The course is graded based on deliverables from both parts and doing a take home exam towards the end of the course. On the first part, students get course points from returned exercises, essays and participation at the discussion sessions (Wednesdays). On the second part, students get course points from the returned group work. The first and second part are weighted so that the full points will give 30% of the maximum course points from each. The take home exam will give the rest of the points (40%). However, as the exam will have also questions about the group project, the actual weight of the project will be higher.

Warning

You will need at least half of the points from each of the three deliverables (Part 1, Part 2 and the exam) to pass the course!

Deliverable cheat sheet:

Deliverable(s)	Weight
Part 1 - essays and attending discussion	15%
Part 1 - Weekly exercises	15%
Part 2 - Group project	30%
Take home exam	40%