Course Information
The entire course will run through this GitHub repository. You can check the course LEARN page for some details, but I will have everything on the the GitHub course so you don’t have to look in lots of different places for information.
The GithHub repository will be updated every week by me with that week’s materials. This means that all you need to do to see the latest information is either visit the course GitHub webpage or “pull” the repository to update your local copy of it.
Lecture Slides & Recordings
Course lecture slides will be uploaded to the repository and lecture videos made available through a dedicated playlist on YouTube. These will be collated into a section on the course front page as the course progresses so they are easily accessible to you.
Programming
Practical programming practice will take the form of weekly formative (not assessed) programming exercises using GitHub Classroom. These will happen in weeks 1-4 and 5-8 (so 8 in total).
Coding Environment
There are a few choices for how you might want to do your coding during the course. Please do ask in the discussion boards if you need any help setting these up.
Noteable - The simplest, and one that requires very little setup. This is the University JupyterLab instance you can pull this GitHub directly in and start coding straight away
Local Jupyter - you can install a version of Jupyter locally using systems like miniconda and Anaconda. There is a good guide to installing Jupyter here.
VisualStudioCode - This is a free open-source coding IDE from Microsoft. It’s excellent and what I would recommend, not least because it has a large number of extensions that make life easier especially for GitHub and Co-Pilot.
We have prepared a Python introductory mini course in case this is useful to people to brush up on some Python basics.
Coursework
There will be one piece of summative assessment in the course accounting for 20% of your final grade. The assessed coursework will be set on Monday 27th October and is due @12pm on Friday 14th November. Note that this course has a no extension or ETA policy in place (see LEARN page) so that I can mark all the coursework and get feedback to you in a timely manner on Thursday 20th November (~1 week after the deadline).
Exam
The end of semester exam accounts for 80% of the final course grade. There will be two revision sessions in week 11 (if needed) for me to address any questions you may have in-person. I will go through some example questions and answers in these sessions. The course has only run once before, but last year’s exam paper is available for you to download here. This year’s paper will be largely similar in structure; I will cover any differences during the revision sessions. In addition you can always ask questions on the piazza forum throughout the course.