The tentative final grades are now available. You can then email me for your grades. However, I wish to again emphasize that the grades I submit to the Faculty of Arts and Science are provisional and final grades can only be awarded by the Faculty. Mark and I read all the projects and in general we both found these projects to be informative and interesting. However, the writing (in termsi of grammar and sentence structure) in many projects could be significantly improved. But again the content was quite good. I wish you all good luck in your exams and throughout your University expereince.
I have posted the alternative project for those not doing the service learning project. Once again, you can ask in class or email me if there are questions on the project. By now you should have chosen a topic and have emailed me the topic. As stated before, I do not want more than two people doing the same topic (first come-first serve). The written component for both the service learning project and the alternative project are due April 6. During the week of April 6, each student doing an individual project will present a 10 minute oral prsentation of the project. For students working together on a service learning project, you can either do an indiviual 10 minute presentation or choose to do one group 15-20 minute presentation. For those doing the sevice project, here is a description of what is expected for service project. Please let me know you preference as to individual or group presentation. I will be scheduling the time slots fopr the oral presentations so as to try to cooridinate related topics but otherwise the ordering will be rather random. You are expected to be ready to present your oral prsentation on Monday, April 6 although most people will be presenting on Thursday, April 9, the final class.
It is clear from assignment A0 that many students can benefit from the various University resources available to help students improve their writing ability. Please consider the resoureces mentioned below.
Instead of a newsgroup, there will be a web forum for this class. Visit it here. There is also a link to it at the top of the page that you can also use. We will continue to post course announcments at this site.
In case you don't know, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sponsors a "First-year Learning Community (FLC)" to help first-year students get the most out of their University life (for more details, see FLC ). Unfortunately, enrollment seems to be full but you can still put your name on a waiting list. You should also take note of the following resources:
This version of SCI199 will be similar to previous versions taught during the 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 academic years
We will pursue the general (and very debatable) theme of GREAT IDEAS in COMPUTING. The ambitious goal is to try to identify the great ideas that have significantly influenced the field. We will concentrate on mathematical, algorithmic and software ideas with the understanding that the importance and usefulness of these ideas depends upon (and often parallels) the remarkable ideas and progress in computing and communications hardware. The list of topics we shall discuss will depend to some degree on the background and interests of the class. Here you can find a list of some possible course topics . It is interesting (relevant to this course) that the Computing Community Consortium is asking the computing research community to help identify "game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years." See the game-changing blog post .
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning SCI199. Some of these documents are electronic versions of handouts given out in class. Some announcements will also be made on this page. See also the forum site given in the links above. Please send any comments or questions to the instructor Allan Borodin (bor ..funnyatsign ..cs.toronto.edu) or the teaching assistant Mark McCartin-Lim (markml..funnyatsign ..cs.toronto.edu).
Assignment 0 is now available. This assignment will be a small part of the participation component of the grading scheme.
Assignment 1 is now available. This assignment will be count as 10% of the grade. It is meant to be a relatively easy assignment.
Assignment 2 is now available and due October 20.
Assignment 3 is now available and due November 17 which is one week later than originally announced.
Assignment 4 is now available and due January 12.
Assignment 5 is now available and due January 26.
Assignment 6 is now available and due March 16.
Assignment 7 is now available and due April 9.
Assignments and the project are expected to be handed in on time, at the beginning of the lecture/tutorial in which they are due. Any assignment which is submitted late will be penalized 20%, no assignment will be considered if more than one week late.