Syllabus

This course is for students who don’t (yet) consider themselves computer persons. Designed for students who work with technology every day but don’t necessarily understand how it all works underneath the hood or how to solve problems when something goes wrong, this course fills in the gaps, empowering students to use and troubleshoot technology more effectively. Through lectures on hardware, the Internet, multimedia, security, programming, and web development as well as through readings on current events, this course equips students for today’s technology and prepares them for tomorrow’s as well.

Instructor

David J. Malan
malan@harvard.edu

Head Teaching Fellow

Doug Lloyd
lloyd@cs50.harvard.edu

Expectations

You are expected to

• watch six lectures online,
• submit, by the deadline, at least five out of six quizzes,
• attend, live, at least five out of six sections online (unless granted an exception, see below under “Sections”),
• submit six assignments online, and
• submit one exam online.

Grades

Final grades are determined using the following weights:

Engagement with the course is quantified as live participation in five out of the six sections and submission of five out of the six quizzes.

Lectures

Quizzes

Quizzes are short ungraded (we care about completion, not correctness) associated with each lecture that allow you to apply each week’s concepts before digging in deeper in section.

Sections

Lectures are supplemented by weekly, 60-90-minute sections led by the teaching fellows. Sections are an opportunity to discuss the course’s material, ask questions, and explore related material. Students are required to attend, live and with webcam and audio enabled, at least five out of the six weekly sections unless granted an exception in writing by the course’s head teaching fellow before the end of the first week of the term. While recordings of sections will be made available within 48 hours, watching those recordings after the fact does not contribute to your engagement score.

Office Hours

Office hours are opportunities for guidance and feedback from the staff on assignments as well as for discussion of the course’s material more generally. Students are not required to attend these sessions if they do not feel they need to.

Assignments

Assignments introduce or reinforce material via exercises, readings, questions, and/or videos.

Exam

The (take-home) exam synthesizes and assesses mastery of the course’s material.

Accessibility

The Accessibility Services Office (ASO) is available to support all students who require accommodations due to disabling conditions; all such accommodations must be approved and coordinated by the ASO. If you require accommodations, please contact the ASO at 617-998-9640, or by email at accessibility@extension.harvard.edu.

Academic Honesty

This course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as “be reasonable.” The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on assignments and projects is not permitted except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your work to classmates and others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from the course’s instructor. Acts considered not reasonable by the course are handled harshly.

If you commit some act that is not reasonable but bring it to the attention of the course’s instructor within 72 hours, the course may impose local sanctions that may include a failing grade for work submitted, but the course will not escalate the matter further except in cases of repeated acts.

Reasonable

• Communicating with classmates about assignments and projects in English (or some other spoken language).
• Discussing the course’s material with others in order to understand it better.
• Helping a classmate identify a bug in his or her code at Office Hours, elsewhere, or even online, as by viewing or running his or her code, even on your own computer.
• Incorporating snippets of code that you find online or elsewhere into your own code, provided that those snippets are not themselves solutions to assigned problems and that you cite the snippets’ origins.
• Sending or showing an answer or code that you’ve written to someone, possibly a classmate, so that he or she might help you identify and fix a mistake.
• Sharing snippets of your own answers or code online so that others might help you identify and fix a mistake.
• Turning to the web or elsewhere for instruction beyond the course’s own, for references, and for solutions to technical difficulties, but not for outright solutions to projects.
• Whiteboarding solutions to projects with others outside of your team using diagrams or pseudocode but not actual code.
• Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you.

Not Reasonable

• Asking a classmate to see his or her answer or code before (re-)submitting your own.
• Failing to cite (as with comments) the origins of code or techniques that you discover outside of the course’s own lessons and integrate into your own work, even while respecting this policy’s other constraints.
• Giving or showing to a classmate an answer or code when it is he or she, and not you, who is struggling with their own.
• Paying or offering to pay an individual for work that you may submit as (part of) your own.
• Providing or making available answers or code to individuals who might take this course in the future.
• Searching for or soliciting outright solutions to projects online or elsewhere.
• Splitting a project’s workload with another individual outside of your team and combining your work.
• Splitting a project’s workload within your team inequitably but claiming an equitable split.
• Submitting (after possibly modifying) another’s words without attribution for some assignment.
• Submitting (after possibly modifying) the work of another individual beyond allowed snippets.
• Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted or will submit to another.
• Submitting work to this course that you intend to use outside of the course (e.g., for a job) without prior approval from the course’s instructor.
• Viewing another’s solution to an assignment or project and basing your own solution on it.