cscs-530-materials

Guidelines for Lab/HW Assignments

Please feel free to work together on your assignments! Working together is a great way to learn and is highly encouraged. However, you must each turn in your own HW/lab writeup and code.

How to turn in assignments

All labs/homeworks will be turned in via the course Canvas site.

What to turn in/how to format your writeups

Please turn in:

• Your main writeup: one pdf, Word, or html document with answers to each problem for the assignment. Pdf or word is preferred, since then I can annotate/add comments to your file in Canvas but html is okay too. Your writeup document should mix written answers (e.g. explaining what you have observed), math/calculations or potentially code snippets, tables, and plots as appropriate. Your document should have some formatting and organization so that it’s reasonably easy to read (i.e. don’t just barf out all the answers from your code onto a page without some section breaks, titles, etc.), with all your plots (and axes!) labeled clearly.

• Your code: all the code needed to generate your results. This can be a single code file/script, or multiple scripts, depending on the lab (e.g. if we’re using NetLogo and Python/R it makes more sense to have multiple files). If you’re doing your labs in Jupyter notebooks/Rmarkdown, you can just turn in the notebook/.rmd file. One thing to beware of if you’re running a notebook or R-like environment—make sure your code will work if I run your entire file from scratch (with nothing in memory). Sometimes leftover variables/etc. in an interactive session can have unexpected effects.

If you have any questions about what to turn in/what should go in the write-up, please ask!

Grading rubric

(This rubric is tentative—I’ll update this section after the first HW if I end up deciding to change the rubric! - MCE)

Homeworks/labs will be evaluated on a 0 to 4 scale, given below (with examples of the types of issues shown as bulleted lists). I will often also include extra notes and comments on your assignment to help with sorting out any issues/bugs.

0: Didn’t turn anything in

1: Turned in but missing parts/multiple major issues

• Missing multiple portions of the lab
• All problems turned in but nothing worked

2: Generally correct but a few major issues

• Missing 1-2 portions of the lab
• Multiple code issues/bugs/incorrect results
• Formatting/write-up/calculations are unclear/hard to read
• Code is very disorganized or parts of code are missing

3: Generally correct with minor issues

• A few code issues/bugs/incorrect results, but generally the right idea
• Some formatting/write-up/calculations are unclear/hard to read but mostly clear
• Code works or seems to work but is disorganized (as we get to more complicated ABMs it will become increasingly important to make sure your code is reasonably clear/well-documented, which is why this one is here)

4: Awesome!

• Everything is there and answered correctly
• Write-up and code are clear