Lecture 1

Learning objectives

After this class, you should be able to:

1. Describe the course objectives in general terms.
2. Describe your responsibilities regarding: following deadlines and instructions, participation, and reading assignments.
3. Schedule your activities to accommodate the assignment deadlines and exams.
4. Explain different components of the assessment process that contribute to your final grade.
5. Explain course policies regarding attendance, missed exams, late assignment, an "I" grade, and professional ethics.
6. Explain some study skills that can help you do well in this course.
7. Use properties of exponents, logarithms, geometric series, and modular arithmetic to simplify expressions.
8. Write proofs using induction and contradiction, and also disprove claims using counter-examples.

Reading assignment

1. Read the syllabus on blackboard.
2. Read the stydy tips for this course on Blackboard, under the 'course library' tab.
3. Review material from your C++ course. The review topics are available at www.cs.fsu.edu/~asriniva/courses/DS11/review/PrereqReview.html.
4. Sections 1.1 - 1.2.
5. Lecture: Math Review.
6. Section 1.3, up to page 8.

Exercises and review questions

• Exercises and review questions on current lecture's material
  1. Obtain CS and FSU computer accounts, if you do not have them already.
  2. Access the class website using blackboard. Take the survey available under "assignments".
  3. What will your grade be if you get 500 points on the assignment portion, and 340 on the tests?
  4. Post, on the discussion forum, any study techniques that you have found effective.
  5. Consider the following hypothetical situation.

     You are given a programming assignment, with the objective of testing your ability to implement a linked list class. You find that a similar homework had been given in a class at a different university earlier, and a solution too has been posted. You download that assignment, modify it, and submit it.

     Discuss whether this is ethical or not under the following two situations: (i) you cite the original source, and mention that you are making a modification, and (ii) you do not cite the original source. Will permission from the original code developer affect your conclusions on whether or not it is ethical?

     Now consider a slightly different situation. Assume that testing your implementation of a linked list is not an objective of the assignment, but you used someone else's linked list code to implement a part of the solution. However, you demonstrated your skill in the objective being tested through your own work. Discuss the ethical issues under this scenario.

     Post your arguments on the discussion forum for lectures.

  6. Exercise 1.8 a. (Find the sum from i = 0 to infinity of (1/(4^i))
  7. Exercise 1.12. (Prove that the sum from i = 1 to N of (2i-1) = N^2)

• Questions on next lecture's material
  1. Write a recursive function to compute the factorial of a non-negative integer.

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Last modified: 30 Aug 2011