Labs

General information#

• Programming labs are once a week at your allocated time, starting from week 2.
• You MUST sign up for a lab time on MyTimetable. Ideally, you should do it as soon as possible, and, in any case, no later than the end of week 1.
• Each lab is 1 hour and 30 minutes long and can only be attended by students allocated to that lab time.

• Immediately following each lab time, there is a 30 minute drop-in session at the same venue. All students in the course can attend any of these drop-in sessions, regardless of which lab time you are allocated to.

• Labs consist mainly of programming exercises. At the start of the labs, tutors will introduce you to the lab before letting you attempt the lab excercises. During scheduled lab times, tutors will check on your progress, and will be available to answer questions and help you with the excercises; they may also go through certain excercises or concepts, and may share tips on how to approach the excercises.

• During drop-in sessions, tutors will just be available to answer any questions or help with any excercises (does not have to be lab related).

• Each week there is a lab, there will also be a self-study quiz released on Ed Lessons.

IMPORTANT NOTE: See the Assessments page for a description on how your attendance at labs, performance in labs, and the self-study quizzes may affect your final mark and the grounds on which this performance is going to be measured.

Schedule#

• Lab content and self-study quiz will usually be released the Sunday prior to the scheduled week
• Please refer to Ed Lessons for the titles of each lab

Ed Lessons#

Lab content for all labs and the self-study quizzes (plus homeworks) will all be released on Ed Lessons.

Ed Lesson is part of the Ed platform (like Ed Discussion). (If you did not yet join Ed Discussion, please see the instructions available here.)

In order to access Ed Lessons, you have to first login into Ed and enter the space of the course.
Then, you have to click on the Ed Lessons icon, available in the main toolbar in the upper right corner of the window, as shown in the screenshot below:

Ed Lessons allows you to write and execute code remotely. If you submit code for an excercise, it will also allow your tutor to view the code you have written, so that they can give you feedback or assistance if things are not working correctly. If you submit a solution to an exercise, Ed Lessons will run some tests on your code and tell you whether your code passed or failed the tests. This will give you some feedback in the event that you need to keep working on the lab excercises after your scheduled lab time is over.

The computers in the lab will also have all the software you need to complete the lab tasks outside of Ed Lessons if you prefer. You may also opt to use your own laptop computer in these labs. For those using the lab computers and are unfamiliar with these, see the lab computer guide in Ed Lessons. There will be time in Lab 1 (in week 2) to get used to working with the lab computers. For convenience, you can (and it is highly recommended that you) install the software used in the course in your personal computer. An installation guide is available in Ed Lessons.

Regardless of where you choose to work on your solution, it is important to ensure you submit your solution on Ed Lessons as we use Ed Lessons submissions as one of the grounds to measure your engagement and participation in the labs. See the Assessments page for details if you didn’t earlier

For those who worked on their solutions on Ed Lessons, you can simply submit your work. If you worked on your solution outside of Ed, you can either copy paste your work back into Ed (easiest), or you can upload your solution into Ed Lessons (you need to make sure the file name matches the original). Make sure you check your solution in Ed Lessons after transferring. Also pay attention to see if your code still passes all tests after transferring into Ed - you could have not copied everything, or have introduced errors during the copying process (such as extra characters). Be sure to recheck your code on Ed Lessons after fixing any such errors.