COMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington and Ghazaleh Parvini

Fall 2021

This is the home page for COMPSCI 250. COMPSCI 250 is the undergraduate core course in discrete mathematics and will deal with logic, elementary number theory, proof by induction, recursion on trees, search algorithms, finite state machines, and a bit of computability.

Instructor Contact Info:

David Mix Barrington, 210 Computer Science Building, 545-4329, private zoom number 459 532 6175, office hours for Fall 2021: Mon 10-11 (zoom), Tue 11-12 (in my office), Fri 11-12 (zoom).

Ghazaleh Parvini, A241 LGRC, office hours for Fall 2021 TBA

The best way to contact either Dave or Ghazaleh is by email.

TA and UCA Contact Info:

TA Chris Doan office hours TBA
TA Kyle Doney, office hours TBA
TA Matthew Jamieson, office hours TBA
TA Ari Rosenthal, office hours TBA
TA Adam Viola, office hours TBA
All TA office hours are in LGRT 220
UCA's Jenny Guo, Ishita Kumar, Hongyue Lin, John Pomerat, Yi Wei

This course is primarily intended for undergraduates in computer science and related majors such as mathematics or computer engineering. COMPSCI 187 (programming with data structures) and MATH 132 (Calculus II) are prerequisites and are pretty strictly enforced.

The course meets for three lecture meetings a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Dave will lecture 1:25-2:15 in Goessmann 20 and Ghazaleh 5:30-6:20 in ILC S331. We may occasionally swap lectures. The lectures will be similar and will follow the textbook pretty closely. Both lecture sections of the course will have the same assignments, exams, and grade scale.

There is one discussion meeting per week for each of the eight sections, at various times on Wednesdays before lecture as indicated on SPIRE. Each discussion will have a written assignment which you will carry out in groups. Discussion attendance is required, so that missing a discussion will incur a grade penalty. The TA's and instructors will cover the sections in various combinations, so they will be as interchangeable as we can make them.

The textbook is the current draft of Dave's in-progress book, A Mathematical Foundation for Computer Science. This is available as an e-book from Kendall Hunt Publishing for $60. It has an "assessment package" where you will need the current version of the book to answer quiz questions. It can be obtained from the eCampus site or directly from Kendall Hunt.

The course is using the Moodle course management system and the Piazza system for student discussion. We will also use iClickers, but they will be used in grading only for classroom attendance. Basic information about the course will be on this site, and specifics of the course will be off of the Moodle main page once it is established.

Announcements 30 August 2021):

(9 July) Dave is constructing a draft version of the entire site today. The full version of the website for Dave's last offering of COMPSCI 250 is available here and has exams with solutions and a full syllabus. The link above is to the lecture slides from the Spring 2014 offering of this course -- our lectures this term will be similar and slides from this term will be posted on Moodle. This offering of CMPSCI 250 will be very similar to Dave's recent ones.

(2 August) We've made slight revisions to the weighting for grade items. We are announcing that the current version of the textbook (with the assessment package) will be available about 10 August.

(8 August) This site is going live today, with an email going out to all registered students. We've set dates for the exams, homeworks, and quizzes.

(30 August) Dave is making some updates to the public site today. The textbook is available now, both the ebook and the assessment package, for $60. Instructions to get it were given by email earlier.

Last modified 31 August 2021