Principles of Programming: COMPSCI 101 Summer School, City Campus

This course is an introduction to programming computers. It is the main introductory course in the Computer Science department and is taken by students from a variety of disciplines wishing to have an understanding of computer programming as well as students wanting to continue on to further studies in Computer Science.

We teach programming using the cross-platform, object-oriented programming language Java. The main focus is on learning to understand the detailed requirements of a programming task, and writing programs that are well structured, correct, easy to read, and to maintain. In order to do this students need to develop an understanding of how to represent information both as data and algorithms within the objects of a Java program.

By the end of the course students who succeed are able to design and implement a medium-size computer program as well as have some idea of the process of program execution.

The course information sheet contains contact information for staff, staff office hours, assessment summary, how to catch up on a missed lecture or lab, how to seek assistance. You can access it online here.

• Labs are a compulsory part of the course. They are worth 10% of your final mark.
• Please note that to pass the course, you must pass both the practical (labs + assignments) and the theory (test + exam) components separately.
• Each week you will have 2 tutorial laboratory sessions
• Labs start on the Thursday/Friday of the first week of the semester. (You will need to locate the tutorial lab room and check that your login and password work on our computers before your first lab.
• All labs are held in the Ground Floor Teaching Laboratory (GTL) - Room G75 of the Computer Science building (Building 303S).
• Before each lab you will be given a laboratory preparation sheet in lectures. This sheet will contain exercises and recommended reading which you are required to complete before the start of your laboratory.
• If you have any problems or queries regarding the labs, please see the lab supervisor, Ann Cameron.

• The Compsci 101 coursebook contains all the material required for Compsci 101.
• The Compsci 101 code examples booklet contains a series of example programs.
• You are expected to read the coursebook before attending your lab sessions each week, and to bring it along to all of your lab sessions together with your code examples booklet.
• This compulsory coursebook and the code examples booklet can be purchased from the University Book Shop (UBS).

• Marks can be checked via the Cecil system.
  Please check your marks each week and contact Ann Cameron if there are any problems.

• The test is worth 15% of your final mark.
• Provisional Date and Time: Wednesday 25th January, 2011 from 5:40pm - 7:00pm
• Location: To be announced closer to the date
• Please arrive by 5:35pm as you will be given 5 minutes' reading time.
• Please notify Adriana Ferraro adriana@cs.auckland.ac.nz if you have a test clash
• Past tests can be found on our Tests and Exams Page

• The final exam is worth 60% of your final mark.
• Date and Time: To be announced later in the course
  It is a 2 hour exam. Please check Student Services Online for a confirmation of the date and time.
• Examination room lists will be posted online and on Campus noticeboards by 5.30pm the day before your examination.
• The exam is closed book, and calculators are not permitted.
• Good luck :)
• Past exams can be found on our Tests and Exams Page

A student who successfully completes this course is:

• able to design solutions to simple problems
• able to implement the designs by writing well-structured programs that follow the language conventions
• able to test programs
• able to debug programs