CS106A introduces code and computer programming for people who have not programmed before. Code and programming are central to so much in modern life, yet code can appear to be impossibly opaque. By working gradually and with its army of section leaders, CS106A takes students into the world code, building things they could not have imagined.
Instructor: Nick Parlante, nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu
Head TA: Ngoc Nguyen ngocng@stanford.edu
Contact Ngoc for course logistics or other help. In particular, the TA handles
homework extensions and issues like that.
See the course page for office hours, and as a first step, Nick and Ngoc are always available right after lecture - feel free to bring your laptop down and chat.
Then we have many section leaders to lead the small sections and provide lots of helper hours for when students get stuck (see below).
CS106A teaches problem solving with the computer, covering all the important topics of basic programming in Python: types, numbers, strings, functions, lists, dictionaries, logic, decomposition, good programming style, whole-program structure, text, file-processing, debugging, and performance. We'll also touch on more advanced topics you might want in the future, including lambdas, comprehensions, modules, and matplotlib.
Python is a huge language with many advanced features, and CS106A does not cover all of Python's features. CS106A teaches the important core features, and you will be able to solve real programming problems with just this course.
CS106A satisfies the university WAYS-FR requirement if taken for a letter grade. Undergraduates should sign up for 5 units. Graduate students have the option of taking it for 3-5 units, but the workload and grading is unchanged. The 3-unit option is just a courtesy for grad students who have a cap on the number of units they can take.
There will be a weekly section that begins meeting in week 2 to study and practice code in a small group setting with individual help. Participating in section is 5% of the course grade. Signups begin Thu of week-1, see the course page for details and the link to sign up. The signups are not first-come-first-served, so it's not a race to sign up. You will have your own section leader for the quarter who will lead section and grade your homeworks.
Wed section note: the section problems will often use the lecture material from Wed. Therefore, only sign up for a Wed section if you tend to be keeping up with live lecture.
CS106A has a large staff of highly capable section leaders. The large staff enables us to staff the small weekly sections, and also allows CS106A to have a lot of helper hours at the so called "Lair" - see the "Getting Help" section on our course page.
In lecture we'll have links to some online code exercises on Nick's experimental server. Other times we will distribute a .zip file with that day's code examples.
We'll use web resources as our Python reference as we go, and Nick maintains a free Python Guide with more detail on Python topics (linked off the course page too).
There is no required textbook, and a book is not needed for this course. However, if a student wants a recommendation, "Introducing Python" by Lubanovic is a good introductory book.
We will use Python version 3. We will have instructions to install it in week 2. At the start we'll use the experimental server which works without installing anything. Later we will do larger exercises where you will need a computer with Python 3 installed on it. You will also need to install the free PyCharm development environment. We'll have detailed instructions for that when we get there.
You need to have a computer (not a chromebook or ipad) to do the work for this class. Stanford can loan you one if needed. See Stanford Tech Lathrop
We will experiment integrating little exercises within lecture, so expect to do some exercises live as we go. Education research shows that doing a little activity with what you just saw helps a lot with learning. (see Carl Wieman, Stanford school of ed.)
We will have weekly programming assignments. Usually homework will go out by Thu and be due the following Tue or Wed night at 11:55pm.
(Formerly SCPD) This lecture is video taped and those videos will be available within about 2 hours of class, linked off the course page. Sometimes the videos will include the students. Here is their standard statement about that:
Video cameras located in the back of the room will capture the instructor presentations in this course. For your convenience, you can access these recordings by logging into the course Canvas site. These recordings might be reused in other Stanford courses, viewed by other Stanford students, faculty, or staff, or used for other education and research purposes. Note that while the cameras are positioned with the intention of recording only the instructor, occasionally a part of your image or voice might be incidentally captured. If you have questions, please contact a member of the teaching team.
Stanford affiliates are welcome to sit-in on the course. Most of the course materials work with a Stanford login without requiring anything special. Please email the TA if something is not working for you. You are welcome to attend a section. Just introduce yourself and please don't give them anything to grade.
We'll have a midterm and a final. The exam problems will be very similar to the coding problems on the homeworks, so you can think of the homeworks as a first practice area, getting the concepts down to get ready for the exams. We'll provide lots of practice problems before the exams.
We may not give any A+ grades at all. In the past, we have had some students taking CS106A inappropriately, and we don't want to encourage it. If you have no experience, or some experience and want to learn Python and problem solving, this is the class for you.
The course grade is based on homeworks and exams. We curve the exam scores.
Homework 40%
Section 5%
Exams 55%
Each student must pass the final exam to pass the course. A final exam can have issues and still pass, but there is a limit, typically somewhere down below 50%.
In the spirit of collegial and cooperative learning, you are free to discuss ideas and approaches with other students, and then write your own solution code. The key is this: all the code you submit you should type in and get working yourself. In particular, it is not ok to share or paste in someone else's code or get code or a previous quarter. You should not be looking at another student's homework code. You should not be getting code help from an AI. The AI has seen our solution code, so this in effect is just another form of copying the solution.
For discussion or trying out ideas, the many lecture examples work well and of course it's fine for everyone to look at and experiment with that code.
Web search: it's fine if you search the web (or an AI) to find the right 2 line phrase to solve something, like "sort strings" - programmers do that sort of search all the time, and finding and using short phrases like that is fine. Do not, however, search for a whole homework function and paste in what you find. We want you to write that code.
The Computer Science department produces many honor code cases at Stanford. This is not because CS is a magnet for cheating; it's just that online submissions provide a large body of evidence, and computer science has tools which do an extremely good job of finding cheating.
If you think a bit of collaboration may have crossed the line, please mention the collaboration at the top of your homework file so your section leader knows. This will most likely not change anything about your grade, you're just getting it on the record. You can never get in honor code trouble for collaboration clearly described in this way.
As mentioned above, CS106A exams will very much resemble the homework problems. So that's an additional reason it's best to author and understand your own code.
On a related note, when you are done with a homework - please don't post your code on the internet! That causes problems for us and for people trying to learn the material later.
In effect we have a big safe-harbor of "talk about ideas, write your own code". It turns out, students who discuss things and then write their own code produce solutions that may be similar but with many little differences too. The position of CS106A is that this is fine.
However, sometimes a student will paste in a copy of the code from somewhere, and then eventually we call them on it, perhaps a little after the quarter is over. Then the student looks at the honor code statement, and makes up this story - "well the code is the same for all those lines because we talked about each line, word by word, and talking is allowed." So we must add — if the discussion is so detailed, word by word, that we get big sections of identical code, that is not within the safe harbor. That is just copying.
It's not that people can be divided into cheaters and non-cheaters in some pre-ordained way, though that is an easy way to think about life. It's more that the stress and bad decision making of a particular situation nudge someone to make a bad choice in that moment. If you feel you are in that position, contact Nick or the TA and we promise we'll work something out where you can pass this class vs. making a big mistake.
1. Worked turned in by the due date will get a 1% on-time bonus. The 1% is small enough that will not make much difference to anyone's grade, but it's a reward for people who start the work early enough to finish on time.
2. After the due date, each assignment will have a full-credit "grace period", 48 hours unless documented otherwise on the assignment. You do not need any permission to use the grace period. Just turn the work in. We have this because we want students to have a little extra time when needed to get a good solution working.
3. Work turned in later than 48 hours can get some credit, but loses about 15% per day beyond the grace period. If you turn something in very late, please contact your section leader so they know it's there to grade. With the 15% penalty going, it's probably better to turn in what you could get working for some credit and move on to the next assignment. We have a lot of assignments. And of course contact the head TA to arrange extra time for extraordinary circumstances. Please email the TA before classtime if you want a response that day. Work does not need to be perfect or complete to get some credit, so turning in something partial is a workable strategy.
Below is our weekly topic plan. There is plenty of time in 10 weeks to cover all the important Python topics we need. You should be able to attend the exams in person.
Note that if there is a campus wide event, such as a big earthquake or a Grad-student strike, we may need to change some dates or class policies.