Course Intro

CSCI 1933 – Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
Adriana Picoral

Outline

  • About me and our staff
  • Class overview

Who am I?

  • Adriana Picoral (PhD)
    • you can call me Adriana, if you want to be formal call me Dr. Picoral (Not Ms. or Mrs.)
    • Assistant Teaching Professor
    • apicoral@umn.edu
    • Office: 300A Lind Hall
    • office hours (drop in):
      • Monday 12pm to 2pm
      • Tuesday 1pm to 3pm

Staff

In this course we a course coordinator and undergraduate TAs.

The TAs are responsible for:

  • Helping you, the students, succeed
  • Grading assignments, quizzes, and exams
  • Helping students on office hours

Talk to a neighbor

Introduce yourself!

Share your

  • Name
  • Program/Major (why you chose that major)
  • One thing that you can do that took many hours of practice

Course overview

The course syllabus has information about assignments, assessment, and dates.

Note due dates (5pm) (Gradescope Attendance)

What do you need to succeed in this class?

A willingness to:

  • try and fail
  • get frustrated and bored
  • be curious about how things work

How is the structure of this class designed to help you succeed?

  • Active learning – you are expected to engage in the in-class activities
  • Deep processing – I will elicit knowledge from you and help you make connections to new content
  • Small sequential steps – each week we build on top of the content of the previous week, make sure you are following along

How is the structure of this class designed to help you succeed?

  • Spaced repetition – this is not the type of course you can cram for 2 hours before the exam
  • Mastery checks – frequent assessment

Academic Integrity

You yourself do the work

  • The goal is not to complete assignments for the sake of completing them, it’s to train your brain
  • You don’t bring a forklift to the gym
  • The goal is to also find joy in computer science and coding – why do people still learn how to play chess if a computer is capable of beating a human in the game?

Academic Integrity

  • Similarity reports will be ran on projects
  • You must be able to explain the code you wrote

Academic Integrity Penalty

Zero on project, one letter grade will be dropped from your final grade

LLMs

Rule 1: Don’t use LLM to:

  • write code
  • plan code and problem-solve
  • debug code
  • test code
  • comment or format code

Skills you need to develop

At some point LLMs can help you with these, I’ll try to guide you when and where.

  • Specification
  • Verification
  • Problem decomposition
  • Code reading
  • Debugging

For any tool (not just LLMs)

You need to know enough about coding to decide whether that tools fits in one of three category:

  • Hype
  • Help
  • Hindrance

Accommodations

  • If you have DRC accomodations, remember to schedule to take the quizzes in their testing center.
  • Contact me to talk about other accommodations

Illness

  • The rule is simple: If you are sick stay home
  • Do the followig:
    • Textbook readings
    • Read lecture slides
    • Contact course staff so for project extensions