This is the public home page for section 05 of COMPSCI 121.
COMPSCI 121 is the first course in Java programming for computer science majors and others who want a course at the level of computer science majors. It is taught in nine sections under the overall direction of Professors Joe Chiu and Jaime Davila. Two of the sections in Spring 2021 are in-person, even as most of the University remains fully remote.
There are asynchronous lectures recorded by Prof. Davila and available on Echo 360. There are two "non-lecture" classes per week, Tuesday and Thursday 4:00-5:15, in ELAB II room 119. There is a lab session most Fridays 2:30-3:20, also in ELAB II room 119. There are also three exams during the term, in weeks 4, 7, and 10, that take the place of the lab sessions for those weeks. The fourth exam is given during the finals period. Finally, there are six programming projects to be conducted during the term.
COMPSCI 121 is a required course in the Computer Science and Informatics majors, is required for the Mathematics major, and meets an R2 gen ed requirement. The prerequisites are an R1 math course or a score of 20 or more on Part 1 of the Math Placement exam (readiness for MATH 127). No specific programming experience is expected, but students who have never written a program in any language will have a steeper learning curve at the start of the course.
The text is from zybooks, a maker of interactive texts customized for particular courses. It is required, since there are required exercise sets to be done while reading the book. It can be purchased through the UMass eCampus portal.
Instructor Contact Info: David Mix Barrington, 210 CMPSCI building, 545-4329 (though I will be in my office only rarely during S21), office hours for Spring 2021 Tue 11-1, Fri 1-2. Zoom number on course Moodle page.
I generally answer my email fairly reliably.
TA Contact Info: Daniel Marew, office hours TBA.
UCA Contact Info: Ava Smith, Kazuha Okamoto.
The course will use the Moodle course management system, and much course material will be available only there. We will also use Piazza for internal commmunication and Gradescope for submitting programming assignments and lab writeups.
Announcements (29 January 2021):
Last modified 1 February 2021