#cpsc 110

[princesswincess]

UBC Course Review Winter 2016

Winter 2016 was my first semester at UBC (University of British Columbia). 4 courses + a part-time job made this semester overwhelming. Looking forward to the end of “Snowmageddon” in VanCity!  I took CPSC 110, MATH 100, BIOL 436 and CPSC 430 and here are my thoughts!

CPSC 110 – Computation, Programs and Programming

Textbook: None

Verdict: Be prepared for a lot of work. (Challenge this course if you can!)

Computer Science 110 focuses on functional programming and design in Dr. Racket (a programming language you’ll never use again!) I had Dr. Kiczales as a prof, who I would recommend if you’ve got to take this course. Others I knew in Dr’s Estey and Berg’s classes also recommended them. While the actual teaching is great,  the design of this course is awful, which makes it extremely time consuming. All the coursework is provided online and instead of normal lectures, you’re required to watch video lectures. In your in-class lecture you do practise problems based on the material you learnt in the videos. The video lectures are lengthy (think 4-7hours extra a week) + you’ve got labs, assignments etc. While the course itself is fair, be prepared for a boatload of work.

Small aside: the justification for the insane amount of out-of-class work was that making students come to lecture having already learnt the material helps them learn better. While I’m sure that this finding is all solid science, I found that because lectures were useless if you hadn’t watched the videos, I would often skip if I didn’t have time to watch 7 hours of video that weekend. Also, why am I paying $600 for what is essentially an online course with extra questions? I believe that video lectures devalue the course as a whole since Coursera, MIT Open Courseware, etc. all exist to provide online learning. The entire reason why I’m paying to go to lecture is to…go to an actual lecture.

MATH 100 – Differential Calculus with Applications to Physical Sciences and Engineering

Textbook: Free

Verdict: You’ll get out of this course, exactly what you put in.

Math 100 was likely the most straight-forward course I took this semester. I had Dr. Walls, who was great at lecturing. A couple good things about Math 100 are the free textbook and the fortnightly quizzes instead of midterms. Personally, I prefer having my marks distributed over quizzes rather than having a midterm worth 20% or so. Besides the final exam, your other marks will come from weekly Webwork assignments online, which aren’t too difficult. My only complaint for this course were the other students, who were so often so loud during lecture you couldn’t hear the prof.

BIOL 436 – Functional Genomics

Textbook: None

Verdict: Wouldn’t recommend.

This biology course is a bit of a mess. The prof does genuinely seem to care about the students, and the class average was high, however I found the disorganization, lack of concrete expectations and returned marks to be stressful.  A large portion of the marks are “completion marks” towards a large term project where you design a functional genomics experiment. The term project requires you to submit small portions during the course and do both a presentation and a term project. The midterm had a group portion and  there is a take-home final  based upon class/tutorial material we had done previously. While the material itself wasn’t too hard, I found that the class was confused most of the time since we were unsure of the prof’s expectations. When I did ask questions I found that the answers I got only made me more confused. I do know others who liked this course, and while I did get a “good” mark, this was my least enjoyable course at UBC, mainly because I had no idea what grade I would get.

CPSC 430 – Computers and Society

Textbook: easily “found” online (or available at the bookstore for ~$150)

Verdict: Great! And not overly difficult if you put in the work.

This course is taught by one of the most engaged and excited profs I’ve encountered at UBC, Dr. Dawson. This is an ethics course with a focus on computer  science related topics. At first I found the course a little daunting because I found it odd to understand and apply the ethical theories we had learned in class; however, once I had gotten the theories under my belt, the course was quite interesting. We talked about things like The Patriot Act, hacking, moral dilemmas etc. I got to learn about a lot of topics that I usually would have avoided because they seemed dry or overly complex. In terms of course-work, there are short essays due about every two weeks and some (easy) online quizzes. The class average was pretty high. The only thing I did not like about this course were that you have to speak in class (of 100+ people) to get participation marks. I found it very daunting to give an argument about topics that I had only a shallow knowledge of. Having said that, if you don’t speak at all during class, it’s only a small percentage of your total mark that is lost. The only pre-req is one CPSC course, so take this one if you have the chance!

[princesswincess]

Winter 2016 was my first semester at UBC (University of British Columbia). 4 courses + a part-time job made this semester overwhelming. Looking forward to the end of “Snowmageddon” in V…

[ayyellesrambles]

so i have a problem set due for cpsc 110 tomorrow and i'm completely stuck on it and i've rewatched all the videos and done practice problems (which are so much easier than the problem set) and i don't know what else to do because it's giving me anxiety :( any advice??

I think you can have one partner for practice problems…but it’s a bit late to go looking for someone. You get part marks, so you can at least work on that? Also, if I remember correctly, your lowest assignment mark get dropped (go look at your outline). 

Usually the CPSC 110 questions are similar to example problems. 

[ayyellesrambles]

do i need to take a lab and tutorial for CPSC 110 and 121? the computer science website doesn't mention a laboratory part for first year computer science courses but does mention a laboratory part for physical sciences and biology

Yes, you need to sign up for the Lab for CPSC 110 and both a lab and tutorial for CPSC 121. You will get a warning telling you to sign up for those sections if you haven’t already done so, don’t ignore those warnings, the labs are very important. 

[ayyellesrambles]

BCS Term 1 Review

This term was a roller-coaster. I was really scared going into the program because I figured everyone in there would be super smart and mature...and I wasn't wrong (our class average for the BCS-specific section of CPSC 110 was above 80% while the averages for the other sections were in the 70s...people in my cohort intimidate me LOL). However, everyone is super friendly and so willing to help in CPSC. I only had class 2-3 days a week, but it was actually pretty tiring and I used up 10 notebooks this term doing practice problems and writing programs by hand. 

I don't know how I feel about my upcoming semester, because I can only take one CPSC course, I'm taking mostly BIOL courses to finish my bridging module more quickly. After taking CPSC courses, I think I enjoy the problem-solving, teamwork and mutual frustration that comes with it more than the solitary work you often do in BIOL classes. 

I took CPSC 110, CPSC 121 and LFS 250, you can read my course review after the break:

Computer Science 110, Kiczales I originally love, love, loved this class because I was flying through the assignments and finishing my labs relatively easily to end up being the second or third person out of the lab. I even managed an A+ on the first midterm so I obviously thought I was killing the course. THEN IT ALL WENT DOWNHILL HAHA. All of the work for my other classes starting to catch up and I then I started falling behind in this class because I kept thinking "Oh well I was doing so well for the first half of the course, it'll be fine, I'll be fine...I've got all this other stuff to do". I was starting to struggle with the assignments, the labs would take me forever to finish and studying for the final was so hard. Lesson I learned: DON'T GET OVER-CONFIDENT.

We had two midterms and a final exam. The midterms were alright, they were to be expected. The final was kinda iffy because we had to solve one large problem, and that always scares me because if I mess up one part...then..yeah.  I still ended up with a decent mark in the class, but wowza. In general, the class was very interesting and I learned a lot of new concepts that weren't mentioned in CPSC 301. This class focused more on how to design programs systematically instead of just writing code and praying that it works. My friends in CPSC tell me that the skills from this class will come in handy later on, and to not disregard it even though we used the Racket programming language, which is a language used specifically for learning how to program. The majority of the marks for all the assignments and midterms were from how well you set up your program and how well it is designed. The actual function itself wasn't usually worth very much. 

If you're just want an intro course on programming and don't care about making your code look nice,  and just on making it work, I would recommend taking CPSC 301 instead if you can. We followed some recipes/design aspects in CPSC 301 but that class focuses more on learning how to do basic (but useful) functions in the Python programming language. You can read more about CPSC 301 by looking it up in my search engine. 

Computer Science 121, Tsiknis

This course is very different from CPSC 110, despite the two of them being 100-level intro courses. We didn't do any programming in this course, it was all about proofs. This course is more math-focused and teaches you on the skills of logic by working with premises and trying to prove or disprove conclusions. I hear this course is really similar to one of the introductory Philosophy courses at UBC. I was actually really scared at first when I found out this course included math because I hated calculus. We didn't end up using calculus and I'd like to think that I ended up being pretty good at proofs and mathematical inductions.

The labs were pretty cool too, they were always done in pairs, except for this one lab on regular expressions. We spent half the term building simple electrical circuits and the other half on the computer evaluating and building models of more complex circuits. We had two midterms and a final exam, all of which were pretty fair and expected. There were also weekly online reading quizzes. 

In the end, I found this course a teeny bit more enjoyable than 110, but only because I actually understood what the heck I was doing. 

Land and Food Systems 250, Fortin

This course was the 6-credit online "elective" course I chose to take to replace some of the exempted courses from my Biology degree. I've always wanted to take this course and since there weren't anymore CPSC courses I could take or any BIOL courses to take for my breadth requirement, I chose this. 

It was a nice break from my CPSC courses though and I found it to be a very interesting course. We learned all about sustainability and our food system. There were required weekly online discussion questions we all had to answer, based on readings, so there is quite a bit of work associated with this course. What I really liked was that the professor didn't expect us to memorize all the details from the papers or notes we had, but simply wanted us to be able to think critically and apply what we've read to our questions. There were also two field trips, one to a dairy farm and one to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. 

I have to admit that I didn't really care for organic, or free-trade before because I'm poor, but this course has definitely changed my outlook on the food system. 

There weren't any midterms, but there were a couple of big projects and a final exam. The professor makes you think very critically and it always made me nervous whenever I posted on the discussion boards haha, but she's actually really nice. 

[ayyellesrambles]

I'm taking CPSC 110 and 121 in the same term this term, is this okay or is there a lot of things you learn from 110 that you need to know for 121?

110 and 121 don’t really overlap. You learn to write programs systematically in 110 with Dr. Racket while you learn to prove statements (verbal and mathematical) in 121. For 121, you build electrical circuits in the first half of the term in lab, and the other half, you’re working on the computer simulating more complex circuits. Dr. Racket is mentioned a few times in 121 in examples, but I found Java is mentioned more often.  

[ayyellesrambles]

can you register for cpsc 121 in term 1 and cpsc 110 in term 2? I put it like this in my worklist and it worked, but isn't cpsc 110 a prereq or a coreq to cpsc 121?

Co-reqs typically act more like recommendations of what to take, if you test your registration and you don’t encounter any problems, then you can assume it’s fine. 

[ayyellesrambles]

Do you think it would be okay to take CPSC 121 before CPSC 110? I don't think I'll be able to do it the other way around because of full classes.

 I haven’t taken them yet myself so I wouldn’t know for sure. It should be fine though, otherwise they would’ve made CPSC  110 a pre-req for CPSC 121.