Course Info

Lecturer: John Flynt

email: john.flynt@colorado.edu

Course Information

Office and Course Days and Hours

Fridays are reserved for scheduled appointments.

Class location, days, and hours: ECCR 143, M W, 3:00 - 4:40
Office location, days, and hours: ECOT 242, M W, 12:20 - 1:30

Topics, Policies, Grades

All the equipment you need is provided in the classroom. The applications and languages we deal with are as follows:

The university provides a solid set of policies regarding the conduct of classes. If you have any concerns at all that fall into this area, please stop by after class or during office hours.

Accessing ECCR 143

Note that if your card is to work for accessing ECCR 143, then you must go to a link provided by ITS and register. Use the following procedure:

  1. Go to Link to ITS (http://www.colorado.edu/its/labs/labaccess.html) to submit a request.
  2. Select ECCR 143 from the list.
  3. Complete the other fields as directed.
  4. When answering the question, "Is there any additional information regarding this request?" type APPM 1710, MW, ECCR 143.

Grades

To complete this class successfully, daily attendance is recommended, along with completion of each of the labs and the worksheets that accompany the labs. Most of the labs will be written and published as PDF files, so you can work them on your own. It is suggested that you work during class and for a few hours outside of class each week. You will have to make arrangements to work in the lab during outside hours. Generally, any lab in the engineering school will provide PCs that have the same configuration as those in ECCR 143. Hours during which the lab is open are posted.

 Area  Percent  Description
 Projects  70% There are quite a few assignments for the course. These consist of three types of project:
  • (80% of the project grade.) Programming projects. Whether Flash, Java, MATLAB, or Excel, your work centers on completing programs.
  • (20% of the project grade.) Quizzes - Worksheets. These can always be completed outside of class, but in many instances, you will find it convenient to complete them as you listen to lectures. They might also be essays that you are asked to write.
 Class Participation  20% Attendance is required. Your participation involves being in class, working on the labs, and showing interest in the topics. Many situations arise in which your expertise on a given topic might prove helpful to others, and on such occasions, you will be called upon to help out. Helping out might involve helping someone else complete at task or taking a few minutes to talk about something you have done are are doing.
 Final Project  10% The course requires a final project. The final project can be from any of the areas of programming we study. The final project includes the following components:
  • A specification for the project, which includes concept, programming, math, and art. It is strongly suggested that you base this project on one of the projects completed during the course. In few cases will a specification that does not involve morphing a project receive approval. The primary reason for this is that the course imposes tight time restraints.
  • The project itself, which consists of the source files, the executable, and assets.

Due Date Policies. Work is due the week after it is listed in the schedule. Work will be collected on Wednesdays. This means that you have nine days to finish work begun on a Monday and exactly a week to finish work begun on a Wednesday. In some cases, if I think it important to do so, I will alter the schedule, slowing down for a day or two. On the other hand, I will try to preserve the schedule and do all that is scheduled. In this respect, some weeks you might do less, other weeks more. Whatever the change, however, every attempt will be made to keep things at an even pace so you can plan your work, and the policy of collecting work the week after it is assigned will be maintained.

Assume that work will not be accepted without the appropriate documentation showing an excused absence, such as a medical, family, or university-related and sponsored activity.

As a general rule, assignments will not be accepted through emails. (An electronic submission system is likely to be used.)

Everything is due by the last day of the course.

If there are any variations to these policies, they will be announced in class and will apply to everyone equally. Please plan to work steadily to get the work done on time.

Textbooks

Some people might be able to complete the class without using textbooks. I have not made any assignments directly dependent on the books. However, if you are a beginning programmer, purchase of the textbooks is helpful, especially with respect to MATLAB. In such cases, I will do what I can to make the questions available in pdf files, but it remains that some questions will refer to passages in the texts, and being able to review them will be extremely helpful.

Generally, I don't recommend trying to get through the course without the books if you are not already confident about using the web to obtain information on programming languages and programming problems. Also, if you have any interest in using Flash, MATLAB, Java, or Excel over your academic or professional career, then I suggest building some type of library. The books in this course will be good investments in that respect. The topics we are dealing with will remain stable for some years to come. The tools, in any event, have now been around for twenty or so years each, and during that time, the features have stabilized.

An effort is made to make the labs fairly self-contained, but this is very difficult given a course with as many topics as this one presents. The labs will be available to you in PDF files. Save them as you go to make yourself a textbook for the course. Recognize, however, that it is extremely difficult to make labs completely self-contained, and I will probably end up making references to the textbooks.

By the way, with the exception of the MATLAB book, these are all soft-cover mass market books, so the prices are far less than what they would be if we used regular textbooks, which increasingly cost between $100 and $200 dollars. These are all in the $30 - $50 range, and you are likely to be able to find used copies.

Shupe and Rosser. Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide. The Shupe book (Flash) is especially helpful for those who are completely new to programming and is the best introduction I know to ActionScript. It is not a good introduction to Flash from the "artistic" perspective.

Deitel and Deitel, Java : How to Program, Eighth Edition. The Deitel book has been around for a long time and is a standard reference for Java.

John Walkenbach, Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA, Wiley, 2007. Note that this is not the same book you will find in the bookstore at the start of the term. The book I ordered for Excel, unfortunately, is not very good other than as a general introduction to how to write a few scripts in Excel. For this reason, I don't suggest buying it at all. I will order the alternative, by John Walkenbach, and this will be at the bookstore, I hope, by the time we get to Excel later in the semester.

William J. Palm, Introduction to MATLAB 7 for Engineers, McGraw-Hill, 2005. The Palm book is one that you will see again in labs for differential equations, linear algebra, and other such courses, including those that concern topics specific to different areas of engineering. I it is a very good book, used by Adam Norris (in the Department of Applied Mathematics) and others who teach the advanced courses. This course provides an introduction to MATLAP that, it is hoped, will make it more rewarding when you employ it in bother the more advanced courses and in general engineering contexts. People often run into problems in the more advanced contexts because of simple things, such as losing their work due to questionable work management procedures. With luck, exposure to the topics offered in the context of this course will eliminate such difficulties.

Resource Documents and Links

For now, the books I can offer are largely centered on Flash since this course started as a course exclusively on Flash. I will add to the resource list as we go, however, concentrating on MATLAB, Excel, and Java.

Weekly Labs, Worksheets, Resources, and Other Assets

Labs and other material are posted on this site as the course progresses. The assignments for each day appear the day the assignment is announced and reviewed in class.

Most of the lectures require you to access the class web site, so when you show up for class, access your browser and then the class web page. The components for the class are as follows:

Policies.

For policies established by the university relating to this and all other courses, see the following sites: