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CS400 |
Syllabus |
Meeting Times:
- Tuesday and Thursday (11:00a - 12:15p): There are two class sessions scheduled per week.
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Team Work Sessions (KEC 118): One of those weekly sessions will be reserved for you to work with your team, unencumbered by "interference" from the faculty. KEC 118 (CS Capstone Lab) has been reserved for your use for those Team Work Sessions, as well as any time (you have 24/7 key card access to the KEC and to KEC 118) that you (and/or your teammates) need to work on your Capstone project. NOTE: It is required to attend all of the Team Work Sessions, even though your professors might not be present.
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Team Status Meetings and Presentations (KEC 1XX): The other weekly session is reserved for your team's weekly status updates, assignment presentations, and periodic Milestone presentations. We will meet in KEC 1XX for all weekly status updates, assignment presentations, and milestones - unless otherwise noted. All of the projects have clients, and those clients will generally be in attendance at these meetings, as well.
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After project teams have been formed, we will set the team meeting day of the week for each team. There will be two Capstone projects, so those team meetings will be scheduled for different days of the week. The days that are not reserved for your weekly team meeting will become the Team Work Session day.
Location: KEC 118 and KEC 1XX
Webpage: https://ycpcs.github.io/cs400-fall2024/
Instructor(s):
Dr. David S. Babcock
Email: dbabcock@ycp.edu
Office: KEC 117
Phone: (717) 815-6442
Office Hours: M: 11:00am-1:00pm, T 9:30-11:00am, W 1:00-2:00pm, R 9:30-11:00am, or by appointment
Consultant/Client
Donald J. Hake II
Email: djhake2@ycp.edu
Computer Science seniors, operating in design teams, apply principles of the design process to create a product or process to meet the needs of a customer. Projects may originate in industry, as a contest sponsored by a professional society, or in other venues. The design team, with the guidance of a faculty advisor, must plan, direct, conduct, and effectively communicate the results of the design effort through a professional technical report and oral presentation. The design project will include material within and beyond the curriculum as well as technical and non-technical considerations. Design projects often result in a deliverable prototype.
Prerequisites: CS320 with a grade of 2.0 or higher
Credit: 3 credit hours
Text: None
Your team's project grade will represent 75% of your overall individual curse grade and will be determined as a weighted average of the grades on the 7 assignments, as follows:
- Assignment 1 - Team Project Proposal - 5%
- Assignment 2 - Weekly Progress Journals, Status Reports, Demonstrations - 20%
- Assignment 3 - Requirements - 10%
- Assignment 4 - Analysis and Design - 10%
- Assignment 5 - Minimal Working System - 10%
- Assignment 6 - 50% Working System - 15%
- Assignment 7 - Final Working System (15%), Presentation (5%), Technical Report (10%) - 30%
NOTE: You will be presenting your work for each of these assignments in class during your assigned team meeting day on the day they are due. On those days that you do not have an assignment or milestone due, you will be presenting progress reports, as part of assignment 2. Your weekly journal entries are the by 9:00a EVERY week on the day of your team meeting, immediately prior to tht meeting, regardless of what else is due that day.**
- Assignment 8 - Professionalism, Leadership, Team Work, and Peer Evaluations - 25%"
Individual course grades will be assigned on a 100-point scale according to the following table, and will be determined on the combination of three factors:
- Weekly Journal Entries and Status Report Presentations (20%)
- Individual Contribution to Team Project (55%): Based on your team's project grade multiplied by your individual effort factor determined from the results of your mid-term and final peer evaluations.**
- Individual Professionalism (25%): The remaining 25% of your individual course grade will be based on the levels of Professionalism, Leadership, Work Ethic, and Team Work that you exhibited throughout the semester, as determined by your instructors, and in accordance with your final peer evaluations.
| Range | Grade |
|---|---|
| ≥ 90 and ≤ 100 | 4.0 |
| ≥ 87 and < 90 | 3.5 |
| ≥ 80 and < 87 | 3.0 |
| ≥ 77 and < 80 | 2.5 |
| ≥ 70 and < 77 | 2.0 |
| ≥ 60 and < 70 | 1.0 |
| < 60 | 0 |
NOTE: Your individual grade will be based on your team's overall grade, as well as the results of your mid-semester and final peer evaluations, which will establish an effort factor that will be used to provide you with a percentage of the team grade for which you will receive credit. This portion of the grade will assess a variety of factors over the duration of the semester-long project, including: individual level of effort, technical contributions and competence, time management, motivation, teamwork, leadership, organization and planning, communication skills, contributions to project documentation, and overall attitude. The individual effort, technical contributions, and technical competence will be determined by the amount and significance of git commits, weekly updates, and peer evaluations.
Attendance at every status/presentation meeting AND every team work session is mandatory. You will be granted two unexcuses absences (no unexcused absences will be allowed for ANY team status/presentation day). You are required to contact both your team AND your instructors PRIOR TO YOUR ABSENCE. Unexcused absences in excess of two will result in a 2% deduction per absence from your final grade.
I expect you to conduct yourself as a professional in this course. Professionalism includes:
- Respect for and courteous interaction with peers, faculty and facilities;
- Integrity, which includes at its core honesty, responsibility and accountability for one’s own actions;
- Sensitivity and appreciation for diverse cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences;
- Constructive evaluation, which means that criticism is offered and accepted in a productive manner;
- Self-reflection and identification of one’s own strengths and weaknesses;
- Responsibility for one’s own education and learning;
- An attitude that fosters professional behavior in colleagues and peers;
- Punctuality at meetings and class sessions;
- Attentive behavior during class sessions, avoiding personal or social use of cell phones, laptops, or other electronic devices;
- Acknowledgement of the Kinsley Engineering Center as a professional workplace, and treatment of this facility as a business or office space, not as an informal space.
I reserve the right to enforce this code through the York College Code of Student Conduct.
For the full policy, go the the Academic Standards section of the current Course Catalog https://www.ycp.edu/about-us/offices-and-departments/registrar/catalogs/.
York College of Pennsylvania, as an institution of higher education, serves to promote and sustain the creation, acquisition, and dissemination of knowledge. In order to fulfill this purpose, an environment of integrity, dependability and honesty must be maintained by all members of the York College community. Without a foundation based on intellectual honesty and integrity, the very ability to uphold the academic endeavors that York College strives to pursue is inhibited.
Academic integrity involves two fundamental expectations:
- Anything you turn in as your own work is, in fact, your own work and your own words, completed without assistance, unless your instructor has given explicit permission otherwise.
- Anything you turn in is truthful. Lab data were generated in the lab (and not made up), hours worked for an internship or coop were actually worked, etc.
YCP’s academic integrity policy includes a non-exhaustive list of activities that are prohibited. Some of the commonly encountered prohibited activities include:
- Plagiarism (passing someone else’s words or ideas off as one’s own without proper attribution).
- Getting assistance from other students on non-collaborative assignments. You are permitted (and encouraged) to get assistance from your instructor and the Academic Success Center.
- Sharing papers, exams, homework assignments, etc. with other students (even if it wasn’t your intent to cheat).
- Ghostwriting (getting someone else to write a paper/assignment, whether it is a friend, an essay mill, or a generative AI tool).
- Using unauthorized assistance on exams (e.g., cheat sheets, websites, publisher test banks, other students).
- Buying/sourcing assignment answers from other people (whether it is other students, a website like Chegg, or other online sources).
- Turning in papers/assignments completed in other classes.
This is not a complete list of prohibited activities. Check out the policy in the catalog for a more comprehensive list. The onus is on you, the student, to verify that any exceptions are allowed in this class by your instructor.
Instructors have full discretion to assign a sanction up to and including a grade of 0 in the class for violations of the policy. Violations will be reported to the Associate Provost of Student Success as outlined in the policy. You cannot withdraw from a class if you have been charged with an academic integrity violation.
If at any point you are unsure whether something is allowed under the academic integrity policy, please ask your instructor!
The following policy pertains specifically to all graded work in this course:
- All graded (individual) assignments are to be completed individually. I encourage you to discuss high level concepts with other students, but any work you submit must be yours alone.
- Direct copying of solutions or work from other students, web sites, or other sources is absolutely forbidden under any circumstances.
- Any sources (books, websites, articles, fellow students, etc.), except for the course textbook and lecture notes, that you consult in completing an assignment must be properly acknowledged. In general, I strongly discourage you from using any resource not explicitly listed in the course syllabus or on the course web page but rather asking the instructor or tutors for assistance.
- Exams must be completed individually using only the resources from the course.
You may work with other students on labs. However, we do expect you to complete and submit them, and they count towards your participation grade: see "Lab Policy".
While York College recognizes students’ need for educational and emergency-related technological devices such as laptops, PDA’s, cellular phones, etc., using them unethically or recreationally during class time is never appropriate. The college recognizes and supports faculty members’ authority to regulate in their classrooms student use of all electronic devices.
York College recognizes the importance of effective communication in all disciplines and careers. Therefore, students are expected to competently analyze, synthesize, organize, and articulate course material in papers, examinations and presentations. In addition, students should know and use communication skills current to their field of study, recognize the need for revision as part of their writing process, and employ standard conventions of English usage in both writing and speaking. Students may be asked to further revise assignments that do not demonstrate effective use of these communication skills.
York College of Pennsylvania offers a variety of academic accommodations to students with documented disabilities to ensure their success. To request accommodations, please contact Student Accessibility Services at (717)-815-1717 or sas@ycp.edu. Student Accessibility Services will discuss the confidential process of requesting accessibility services and establish the accommodations for which the student is eligible.
There is a possibility that during this course, classroom lectures may be recorded in accordance with York College of Pennsylvania policies for Student Accessibility Services.
This syllabus is subject to change by the instructor.