TBA

Students on the waitlist will be considered in the order normally set by the CPSC department except:

1. Waitlisted students who do not attend a workshop or are substantially late will lose their standing and be removed from the course. (We will not move students from the waitlist from the official start of the term until after the first workshop to better enforce this policy.)
2. Your availability for lab sections may also affect when you are moved into the course. (I.e., we need space in both lecture and a lab you can attend to add you to the course.)

We may form project groups entirely from waitlisted students or by replacing students who dropped from existing teams, but we are unlikely to provide free choice of group to waitlisted students.

Your course project will be completed in a group of four. All members of the group must be registered in the same lab section!

We are open to discussing groups of three or five in extraordinary cases (including where the our lab size just isn’t divisible by four!), but do not plan or expect to have a group size besides four.

• Emergencies: If you’re ill or an accident or emergency occurs, contact the course staff and your group ASAP to let them know at least that you will be or did miss because of an emergency. Follow-up with the course staff with enough details for us to be able to accommodate your absence in terms of grades. Expect to put in a lot of work to make up the missed time!
• Planned absences from workshops: If you will miss a single workshop in the term because of scheduling conflicts, communicate that to the course staff RIGHT AWAY and by at least a week before the add/drop deadline. We may be able to accommodate that. Also be sure your group knows once you’ve formed a group. If you will miss two or more workshops, drop the course. That’s the equivalent of missing four weeks of lecture in a regular course that has mandatory lecture attendance and is NOT ACCEPTABLE. See rubric for absences here.
• Planned absences from labs: If you have to miss a small number of labs over the term for good reasons, we should be able to accommodate that. Be sure to let us and your group know in advance. If possible, we may want you to attend the other day’s lab.
• Planned absence from final showcase: Treat this like missing two or more workshops (as discussed above) or a course’s final exam. You should likely DROP THE COURSE.

Contact us privately on Slack (preferred) or at cpsc455-staff@cs.ubc.ca in all of these cases. If you contact us on Slack, please add ALL course instructors (Ian, Danya, Stephanie) to your Slack chat.

For all course components, if you have extenuating circumstances, contact us privately on Slack (preferred) or at cpsc455-staff@cs.ubc.ca ASAP, ideally in advance, and we will try to handle the situation empathetically, reasonably, and respectfully. If you contact us on Slack, please add ALL course instructors (Ian, Danya, Stephanie) to your Slack chat.

A few components have specific additional rules:

Individual Assignments:

Individual assignments are graded by demo. As a result, managing late assignments is rather burdensome! We do allow a single late submission to be graded by demo at the next Saturday workshop (last repo push Friday night) with an ostensible 20% point deduction for being late. If you need to take this option, you must contact us privately and reasonably promptly so we can plan for the late demo. However, note:

• The 20% point penalty is just to disincentivize being late. We expect to waive it if late submissions don’t get abused.
• On the other hand, if you are late more than once, we may impose additional penalties or disallow further late submissions. If the logistics of late assignments prove too challenging, we may stop accepting late assignments. 🙁

Scrum reports:

We do not accept late Scrum updates. Instead, update us on where you are when the time comes for the update! (We’ll allow a reasonable grace period. If your computer was hit by a bus with the flu, please get to a library branch or UBC lab as soon as you’re able and post your (rather exciting) update!)

Final showcase:

It would be logistically challenging to consider late final presentations and impossible to consider them fully. Try to arrange, even in emergencies, that someone on your team can handle the presentation. Of course, contact us in case of emergencies!

Our course builds on the department’s academic integrity statement with additional rules designed to create a professional but collaborative environment.

• For group submissions:
  • Group submissions are the joint effort of your group. We place no specific limits on your collaboration except where we explicitly ask you to document and discuss it (Scrum updates, peer evaluations, individual components of presentations/reports, etc.). Collaborate productively so that everyone learns!
  • The majority of your project should be yours, as a group. However, we encourage you to find help and resources, as you would in a professional setting! Where you use or adapt existing code, you must cite it and be cognizant of its license. Where you get help from others, you must acknowledge that help. (This is especially critical for classmates, as it may benefit their participation grade!) Citations/acknowledgments should be in a clear section in your main README.md, in your license (if you have one!), and repeated locally where you used the code/help.
  • Critically, be able to justify and explain your design: no piece should be obscure to your group as a whole, and little should be obscure to any individual team member.
• For individual submissions:
  • Keep your repository for your individual assignment private until after the assignment’s deadline, at which time change it to public for grading purposes.
  • Except where a tutorial used for the assignment guides you to do so, do not copy-paste code. Ask for help only from course staff or in “public venues” from fellow students: during lab or workshops or on public Slack channels. Otherwise, ensure you follow the group submission guidelines for citation and acknowledgment!
  • Critically, be able to justify and explain all of your design.

We hope these rules encourage collaboration that helps you learn. Please inform us if you find they are imposing unreasonable limits on your work!

As noted in the section on required materials, we will require you to register with a variety of web-based tools that may be hosted outside Canada. In some cases, we may register you directly for such services using your @ugrad.cs.ubc.ca email alias (as listed in https://www.cs.ubc.ca/getacct).

Thus, we want to remind you to keep your @ugrad alias private, just as you would any other account information. If you choose not to keep your @ugrad alias confidential, please note that UBC will proceed on the assumption that you do not object to the services we use potentially identifying you personally, and that you are consenting to the storage of personal information on their servers outside Canada.

No one is expected to know the material in this course before you start the course. If you know none of the tools/skills we’ll learn this term, that’s OK; indeed, that’s the point!

However, we also expect that registrants will have a wide range of pre-existing skills. That means (once the term starts) someone can probably help you with whatever problem you run into. USE our Slack channel to ask for help, and help others as much as you can! Our participation points encourage this!

This is a project course with extremely hands-on workshops and labs. Be sure that you do the required preparatory work before each workshop (except the first)—which often includes fundamental steps like installation—or fall immediately behind.

Also, be sure to manage progress on your project and communication with your team. Letting work slide to the end of the project will have a tremendous negative impact on your health, well-being, and grade. Letting communication or teamwork issues slide in your group can cause the same. We’ll try to use regular design reviews to give you an opportunity to flag these issues to us and to yourselves.

Please ask us for help when you need it!