Overview of Comp 3005 Course Structure

Hello everyone and welcome to Comp 3005 for the fall of 2024. My name is Louis Nel and I'm the prof for both the A and B sections this term so we'll basically run them as a single course. The teaching team will be myself. We have Leila as a lab TA coordinator. Although there's no labs per se, there's no tutorials in this course, Leila will be managing the online TA office hours and scheduling the various time slots for that and working on the distribution of the assignment grading, that kind of thing. And then we have a team of, I believe, 11 TAs that will be grading your assignments and Hopefully we'll have quite a variety of office hours available for you to ask questions. So this is a course on database management systems and fundamentally it's about learning the architecture and philosophy of relational databases. Relational databases have been sort of the reigning database architecture for a long time since you know the 1970s probably. Lately there's also been some revived interest in the databases that are something like a JSON store. They match well with some of the things that web applications are doing. But a general purpose database, as a general purpose database, relational databases are still the ruling technology. So this video is just an introduction to the course itself. You'll find this video in the Topics and Schedule section of the Course Content website, which I'll show you how to get to, and that's where I'll also post the weekly content, which will consist of new material that I record or lectures that I've already recorded and I'm still happy with. Generally, most of the effort is on developing new content for assignments and things like that and improving certain lectures. Lectures that I'm still happy with, I'll kind of post in the form they were for the previous offering of the course. So what I'd like to do today is walk you through the platforms that you'll most be visiting for the course. Basically they consist of Brightspace, which is the Carleton admin portal for the course. That's where you'll submit your assignments. That's where you'll find links to the TA office hours. And that's where you'll also find the online quizzes that we will do every other week in the course. The lecture content is on a separate website that I maintain. And that's where I'll kind of keep a diary of topics. And that's where I'll also post the actual words of the assignments and that kind of thing. So some profs like to use Brightspace for both administering a course and for maintaining and housing the course content. I'm using Brightspace more for just the administration and the submission place for you to submit your work assignments and doing the online quizzes. The actual lecture content, the lectures themselves will be hosted on YouTube. but the course content website will also have a bunch of PowerPoints and notes that those lectures are based on and where I'll post the assignments themselves for you to work on. Okay, so let's take a quick tour and I'll hopefully give you enough orientation so you know how to navigate the course. Let's start with the Brightspace page for the course. Okay, so here is the Brightspace for our particular offering. You'll notice that it's section A and B combined. And right now I've got just a few topic areas. We've got a link to where you're going to find the course content website. There's a section where we're going to post the TA office hours and we will be using Zoom. for the office hours. So that's one of the platforms that you'll be using aside from Brightspace. There's the place where I'll put the submission links for your assignments, but the actual description of the assignments will be on the course content website. And here you're going to find links to the online quizzes, which will become active in the time window that I want you to. do the quiz. Not shown as a topic area but there's going to be the forum, discussion forum, so you'll find that under tools, discussions and you know I've, this is where I'll put discussions for us to serve as question and answers. And I'll answer questions and the TAs will also answer questions. We'll be posting some specific topic areas. So please post your questions within the correct topic area just so that we don't overlook your question. Like if you're asking a question about assignment one, post it in the topic area that I will create for assignment one. That way your question won't be overlooked. OK. Let's go back to the course home. And so the first important place you're going to start is with the course content website. And let me kick up the font here a little bit. Course content website. So the course content website is just a link to a web page that I'm going to maintain. And to access it, you will need to enter a user ID, which for us is going to be 3005AB, meaning for section A and B, and the password is just going to be fall 2024. Just a quick note that the course content website itself will be dismantled at the end of the course, but I will take all the notes we have in all the video lectures and I'll archive them here in Brightspace. So you'll have access to that content for as long as you have a Brightspace account. OK, so let's go over there. Let's go over to the course content website. If you click on that link, you'll get there. I've got to open another tab in my browser and it looks something like this. So again, we've got comp 3005 A and B for fall 2024. And there's some lecture areas. Now, traditionally, I used to have a sort of a main. splash page here where I would post course announcements, but we will use Brightspace instead. Every week I will email you a sort of task and deliverables email to summarize what we're doing that week and we'll handle announcements like that through Brightspace. That way myself and Leila can both post announcements in Brightspace and send group emails like that. So I've made a little note here saying that The announcements will be in bright. By the way, you'll notice that, you know, I'm trying to keep my mouse pointer big enough so you can see it. As far as the font size, if there's something I really want you to read in the video, I'll make the font size bigger. Right now I just want you to get an overall sense of the shape of the website. Now the most important place that you're going to be visiting regularly, aside from, you know, where the assignments are posted, is this section called lecture schedule and topics. So if we go there, what you're going to find is something that looks kind of like a week to week diary. You know, I've kind of made the blue color alternating with green, alternating with blue, just so I can keep track of, you know, week one, week two. And you'll find video content posted there and links to the specific notes that I'm posting for you guys to look at. The notes are generally you know, HTML documents describing things or power PDFs of PowerPoint presentations. The video that you're watching right now I will add here to the course introduction when I'm finished filming this. There should already be a few videos there speaking specifically about some background concepts that I would like you to visit in week one of the course. In the first week I'd like you to visit those and take a look at the installation notes for SQLite. SQLite is going to be the database we use for our assignments in the course. Okay, everyone's going to use that database. And then the other thing is you'll you will find a section with my lecture notes and currently those notes are probably in the state that they were in last time I taught the course. So you can expect that these will be updated as we come around to the specific topics. I'm always working on the notes while I'm teaching. So I will generally use some sort of a revision number so that if you're looking at the notes you'll know if it's been updated since the last time you might have looked at them or downloaded them, something like that. Okay, so again in the course content website, you're gonna find the notes, you're gonna find this diary and again these buttons like this button for the posting of assignment one will become active, colored and active. Right now, if you click on it, nothing will happen because there's no content there yet. So in this lecture schedule and topic section, you're going to find the lecture content and you're going to find the links to the assignments. There'll also be reminders of when the quizzes are. The quizzes will be every other week and they will be held in Brightspace and there will purposely be a time window which is going to stretch from Wednesdays four to Thursdays at 730 the time window is big enough so that it overlaps at least one of your official class times in the course. The official class times of the course are only going to be used for these quizzes and I want to make sure that the quiz window contains one of your official class time so that everybody you can't say I'm not available for the quizzes because you have to be available for at least those class times. I'll also be putting like these red things in the diary is usually indicating when there's something due, a deliverable like a quiz that has to be done and an assignment that is due. Assignments will be submitted in Brightspace, typically Wednesday night, and quizzes will start on a Wednesday, finish on the Thursday after at the end of the like. There's a Section A, I believe, class on Wednesdays that start at 4, and a Section B class that starts at 6 and goes. And so you can start the quiz anywhere from 4 till 7.30. Once you start a quiz, you will have an hour to finish it. So as long as you start it within that window, then you can have the hour to complete it and submit it. So keep your eye on this. You'll notice most of this is blank right now because I haven't got course content posted there yet. except for the bit of introductory stuff. Another platform or area that you'll be visiting a lot is the sqlite.org website. sqlite is going to be the database we use for the course and there's a few areas that you're going to use a lot like looking at the syntax diagrams for SQL and we'll be doing probably our first assignment we'll play with this a little bit. and get you used to it. Again, you know, I'll point out that one of the things that you guys will probably have to do for one assignment and a final project is to make a screen capture video to demonstrate your work. And pay attention to us being able to see a mouse pointer. You can see I've made, hopefully made the mouse pointer big enough that you can see it on the video. And depending on what you're demonstrating, you may have to, for example, kick up the font size. so that, you know, we can see what you want us to be able to see. If you're just trying to illustrate the shape of a website like this, at this point, I may not expect you to be able to read the text on the video, but you can see kind of the overall shape of the webpage. Okay, so let me go back to the talking head here. So the other thing I want to do today is just... look at some highlights from the course outline and so that you can understand how the course is going to be administered and in particular how you're going how your grades are going to be computed that's usually the thing that's most of most interest to people when they look at the course outline okay so let's go back to the course content website and there's a section called the course outline so I'll click there and we'll take a look at it again let me kick up the font a little bit So you'll notice, yes, there are official class times, but the only use of those class times is going to be the online quizzes that happen every other week. Everything else is asynchronous. The lectures will be posted whenever, some new content every week, but not synchronously with the class times. So you can do this course completely online from a remote location. There's no in-person activity that you have to show up for. There's the calendar description of the course, and their calendar descriptions are usually pretty vague. I've tried to give a little bit more of a detailed description of topics, and typically this list of topics is kind of what we got to do the last offering. and that'll serve as a template for where we're going to go. There's no official textbook for the course, but the one that I use some examples from is the El-Mazri and Navath Fundamentals of Database Systems, which is probably in, I don't know, it's 9th or 10th edition. Who knows? It's a very popular book. One of the... Running examples in the PowerPoint presentations and video lectures comes from this book. And that's on purpose. It's not just because I'm too lazy to make up my own example. I want to use an example where if you need more explanation that I'm providing in the lectures and you want to read more about this running example, then that would be a good reason to get the book. So I'm purposely doing one. running example throughout the course which is taken from this particular book. It doesn't matter which edition you get. Any edition will probably be fine because the example stuff we're talking about is fairly basic in the world of databases. It doesn't rely on the latest thing that's happening this year. So again, textbooks are expensive and don't rush out and buy the book if you don't think you need it. I think the notes that we provide are sufficient for most people, but if you really are someone who likes to have a very detailed discussion of an example, then that would be the one I would suggest for you. Again, please pay attention to the copyright of the material that we post, and don't repost it somewhere else. The software that we're using, this is an OS agnostic course. You can run the course on Windows or Mac or Linux. Probably not Chrome. Probably not a Chromebook because, I mean, I don't know how much development you can do on Chromebooks. The main piece of development software is going to be the SQLite database. Although as the project for the course, I'm going to ask you to wrapper that database in some sort of an app. technology of your choosing. People have used in the past, they've used Python that they learned in first year. They've used the technology from the web dev course 2406, or you can use the technology from the Java course, comp 1406. All programming languages have some kind of wrapper that speaks to an SQLite database. SQLite, you know it's safe to say that SQLite is the world's most popular database. By that I mean there are more instances of SQLite running than all other known databases combined, and I mean by a long shot. So all programming languages tend to have a hook into speaking to an SQLite database file. And one of the things I'll ask you to do for your project is to investigate your favorite programming language and build something that then speaks to the database. We'll probably do some examples that are based on the Comp 2406 technology, but I'm not expecting you to have necessarily taken that course. It's not a prerequisite for this one. Okay. In this course, your assignments will be a combination of programming and design work, written work. And Pay very careful attention to what formats I'm asking for you to submit the work in, especially the written work. Typically I'll ask you to producing some sort of PDF document and an organized document, not a bunch of loose files that we're supposed to sift through. Pay very careful attention to the format requirements because generally the marking scheme will be if you don't adhere to the format requirements and the grade is automatically zero. We won't use any of the TA resources to mark things that don't comply with the formats that we're asking for in the assignment. So it's crucial to pay attention to those things. You'll likely have to make a screen capture video with some one or two places in the course probably for one assignment and for your project So for that, you know use some sort of screen capture software most operating systems have some kind of free version I'm using QuickTime here on the Mac. It's free on the Mac. I think Windows has Game bar or something like that, but you know, that's not a typically a big deal and You will be zipping up your content for submission to Brightspace and we're only accepting zip format. So don't start using other formats like RAR or TAR or whatever. Only the zip stuff will be accepted. And again, I'll make that clear in the description of the assignments. Again, we'll be using Brightspace for the assignment submission. And again, Brightspace enforces deadlines. And when you pass the deadline, further submission is not possible. Okay, so let's talk about the marking scheme. This is probably the part that's most interesting at this stage. So the assignments are going to make up half the course mark, and there's going to be five term assignments and one project. Of the five term assignments, we're going to count the best four. And for the quizzes, the quizzes are going to make up 35% on the mark. And there's going to be six quizzes and we're going to count the best five out of six. Now, this is very important. You'll notice that there's a little bit of slack. You can miss a couple of deliverables. And that's the mechanism we're using to account for people getting sick or something. So it's very important to understand there's no medical notes, no doctor's notes, no self-assessments. You don't get extension. There's no extensions. You don't get extensions if you're sick or something like that. What happens instead is that we won't count all the deliverables. Specifically, we'll give you a free assignment and a free quiz. If you drop below that deliverable, you're basically dropping below 80% roughly of the course deliverables. And I'm not willing to... give out a mark that is an average of deliverables that account for less than 80% of the course deliverables. Okay, so basically there's five assignments. You get one free one. There are six quizzes. You get one free one. The only thing that's not free where you don't get a free one is the project. You have to submit the project. Now, the project requirements will be posted very early and we'll encourage you to submit drafts as we go along. so that if you did get sick two days before the due time for the final project, you should have something already submitted and that will make up your grade. There's no exam in the course, so the assessment of the test-like assessment is all based on the bi-weekly tests. I like that approach because it kind of chunks up the topics a little bit so that you don't have this exam that covers the whole course at the end, that kind of thing. So again in red here, very important, you may miss one assignment and one test for medical compassion or whatever reasons. We're not asking you for the reasons. If you miss more than that, a mark of zero is going to be used in its place. Now if you're really sick and you start missing more than that, well probably there's more things going on in your life than this course. And if you're dropping to below those deliverables, then you're probably going to be better off to just withdraw and then come back and start again when your situation is resolved. Okay, so again we will not be collecting doctor's note or medical assessments for missed work. There will be no extensions based on medical situations. The slack is based on us not counting all the deliverables. The other thing to be very important, very aware of, is that we will have a specific number of days in which you have to appeal a mark once we've posted it. Typically, it'll be 10 days after we post a mark. If you're unhappy with your mark, you need to appeal within that window. Otherwise, we won't be going back in time. to earlier work to deal with appeals. Okay, and again, the appeal, you'll make the appeal with the marking TA first. And once the TA has responded, if you're not happy with the response, then I'll get involved and review that as well. But I'm hoping this can be resolved with the marking TA in most cases. Okay, so there'll be a course webpage as we talked about or that you're looking at here. And it's... you can access it through Brightspace. So you have to have access to Brightspace. You have to be registered in the course to know where to look for the course content website. There's a bunch of stuff that the university policies and again I'll just zoom down to the bottom of this where you notice I've put in red and scratched out some of the typical policy to remind you that this course In this course, we're not using medical notes or self declarations. Instead, the marking scheme allows you to miss a certain number of deliverables. And, and if again, if your situation gets more grave than that, then then you've got more problems probably than worrying about this course. Okay, so that's the go back to the talking head here. So that's a quick tour of how the course will be administered. Again, this course can be done entirely online. The format of the course was kind of developed during COVID restrictions where things had to be online, but now this is a choice to continue with some of our course offerings at Carleton to be online. We found that students actually like a mix of in-person courses and an opportunity to do some work online. meaning usually that it's a bit more asynchronous. It's easier to fit into your schedule of other things that you're trying to do. One of the things I discovered during COVID with the online courses is that it's important to keep a regular rhythm in the course. And the rhythm can't just be the professor posting new content every week. It's got to have deliverables that have a rhythm to them. And so the rhythm of this course is there's something for you to submit every week. And they'll be alternating between assignments and quizzes. So there's something, there's a deliverable every week. And that keeps up a rhythm of the topics. And what I'm hoping works in your favor is that the quizzes will focus on the topics that are currently being covered in the course, rather than having a big exam. covers everything in the course at the end. I don't recall people ever having issues installing SQLite. It's a very simple little binary that you install and it gives you a command line interface and then it'll be up to you to investigate how you might want to access that with your favorite programming language or your favorite programming technology. Okay, so I'll sign off there and just again say welcome everybody. Keep your eye, especially in the first week or so, with links that we post for how office hours will work as we set up schedules. And like I said, we'll probably use Zoom for the office hours. So again, the main platforms that you'll use in this course is Brightspace for the course admin stuff, the course content website, Zoom for office hours, some YouTube stuff, both for, you know, listening and watching the lectures and possibly for you to post. a screen capture video, and then the SQLite database that we'll be talking about extensively throughout the course. So you'll notice I haven't mentioned anything about a Discord server. We're not going to have an official Discord server in the course. I want you to use the Brightspace forums that we create for the question and answer. Now in the past when we've done that, when we've not had a Discord server, the students sometimes create one of their own. which is fine, but just be aware that myself and the TAs won't be joining that Discord server. That would be unfair and it'll discourage you from paying attention to the official question and answer area of the course. Okay, so we cannot answer questions in your private Discord server if you choose to set one up. Okay, so Keep your eyes open for regular weekly task and deliverable emails from me and it'll summarize what we are working on and important links that you should be visiting and let's get going. Okay, bye for now.

And then we have a team of, I believe, 11 TAs that will be grading your assignments and Hopefully we'll have quite a variety of office hours available for you to ask questions. So this is a course on database management systems and fundamentally it's about learning the architecture and philosophy of relational databases. Relational databases have been sort of the reigning database architecture for a long time since you know the 1970s probably. Lately there's also been some revived interest in the databases that are something like a JSON store.

They match well with some of the things that web applications are doing. But a general purpose database, as a general purpose database, relational databases are still the ruling technology. So this video is just an introduction to the course itself. You'll find this video in the Topics and Schedule section of the Course Content website, which I'll show you how to get to, and that's where I'll also post the weekly content, which will consist of new material that I record or lectures that I've already recorded and I'm still happy with.

Generally, most of the effort is on developing new content for assignments and things like that and improving certain lectures. Lectures that I'm still happy with, I'll kind of post in the form they were for the previous offering of the course. So what I'd like to do today is walk you through the platforms that you'll most be visiting for the course. Basically they consist of Brightspace, which is the Carleton admin portal for the course.

That's where you'll submit your assignments. That's where you'll find links to the TA office hours. And that's where you'll also find the online quizzes that we will do every other week in the course. The lecture content is on a separate website that I maintain.

And that's where I'll kind of keep a diary of topics. And that's where I'll also post the actual words of the assignments and that kind of thing. So some profs like to use Brightspace for both administering a course and for maintaining and housing the course content.

I'm using Brightspace more for just the administration and the submission place for you to submit your work assignments and doing the online quizzes. The actual lecture content, the lectures themselves will be hosted on YouTube. but the course content website will also have a bunch of PowerPoints and notes that those lectures are based on and where I'll post the assignments themselves for you to work on.

Okay, so let's take a quick tour and I'll hopefully give you enough orientation so you know how to navigate the course. Let's start with the Brightspace page for the course. Okay, so here is the Brightspace for our particular offering.

You'll notice that it's section A and B combined. And right now I've got just a few topic areas. We've got a link to where you're going to find the course content website.

There's a section where we're going to post the TA office hours and we will be using Zoom. for the office hours. So that's one of the platforms that you'll be using aside from Brightspace.

There's the place where I'll put the submission links for your assignments, but the actual description of the assignments will be on the course content website. And here you're going to find links to the online quizzes, which will become active in the time window that I want you to. do the quiz. Not shown as a topic area but there's going to be the forum, discussion forum, so you'll find that under tools, discussions and you know I've, this is where I'll put discussions for us to serve as question and answers.

And I'll answer questions and the TAs will also answer questions. We'll be posting some specific topic areas. So please post your questions within the correct topic area just so that we don't overlook your question.

Like if you're asking a question about assignment one, post it in the topic area that I will create for assignment one. That way your question won't be overlooked. OK. Let's go back to the course home.

And so the first important place you're going to start is with the course content website. And let me kick up the font here a little bit. Course content website. So the course content website is just a link to a web page that I'm going to maintain.

And to access it, you will need to enter a user ID, which for us is going to be 3005AB, meaning for section A and B, and the password is just going to be fall 2024. Just a quick note that the course content website itself will be dismantled at the end of the course, but I will take all the notes we have in all the video lectures and I'll archive them here in Brightspace. So you'll have access to that content for as long as you have a Brightspace account. OK, so let's go over there.

Let's go over to the course content website. If you click on that link, you'll get there. I've got to open another tab in my browser and it looks something like this.

So again, we've got comp 3005 A and B for fall 2024. And there's some lecture areas. Now, traditionally, I used to have a sort of a main. splash page here where I would post course announcements, but we will use Brightspace instead.

Every week I will email you a sort of task and deliverables email to summarize what we're doing that week and we'll handle announcements like that through Brightspace. That way myself and Leila can both post announcements in Brightspace and send group emails like that. So I've made a little note here saying that The announcements will be in bright. By the way, you'll notice that, you know, I'm trying to keep my mouse pointer big enough so you can see it.

As far as the font size, if there's something I really want you to read in the video, I'll make the font size bigger. Right now I just want you to get an overall sense of the shape of the website. Now the most important place that you're going to be visiting regularly, aside from, you know, where the assignments are posted, is this section called lecture schedule and topics.

So if we go there, what you're going to find is something that looks kind of like a week to week diary. You know, I've kind of made the blue color alternating with green, alternating with blue, just so I can keep track of, you know, week one, week two. And you'll find video content posted there and links to the specific notes that I'm posting for you guys to look at.

The notes are generally you know, HTML documents describing things or power PDFs of PowerPoint presentations. The video that you're watching right now I will add here to the course introduction when I'm finished filming this. There should already be a few videos there speaking specifically about some background concepts that I would like you to visit in week one of the course. In the first week I'd like you to visit those and take a look at the installation notes for SQLite. SQLite is going to be the database we use for our assignments in the course.

Okay, everyone's going to use that database. And then the other thing is you'll you will find a section with my lecture notes and currently those notes are probably in the state that they were in last time I taught the course. So you can expect that these will be updated as we come around to the specific topics.

I'm always working on the notes while I'm teaching. So I will generally use some sort of a revision number so that if you're looking at the notes you'll know if it's been updated since the last time you might have looked at them or downloaded them, something like that. Okay, so again in the course content website, you're gonna find the notes, you're gonna find this diary and again these buttons like this button for the posting of assignment one will become active, colored and active. Right now, if you click on it, nothing will happen because there's no content there yet.

So in this lecture schedule and topic section, you're going to find the lecture content and you're going to find the links to the assignments. There'll also be reminders of when the quizzes are. The quizzes will be every other week and they will be held in Brightspace and there will purposely be a time window which is going to stretch from Wednesdays four to Thursdays at 730 the time window is big enough so that it overlaps at least one of your official class times in the course.

The official class times of the course are only going to be used for these quizzes and I want to make sure that the quiz window contains one of your official class time so that everybody you can't say I'm not available for the quizzes because you have to be available for at least those class times. I'll also be putting like these red things in the diary is usually indicating when there's something due, a deliverable like a quiz that has to be done and an assignment that is due. Assignments will be submitted in Brightspace, typically Wednesday night, and quizzes will start on a Wednesday, finish on the Thursday after at the end of the like.

There's a Section A, I believe, class on Wednesdays that start at 4, and a Section B class that starts at 6 and goes. And so you can start the quiz anywhere from 4 till 7.30. Once you start a quiz, you will have an hour to finish it. So as long as you start it within that window, then you can have the hour to complete it and submit it.

So keep your eye on this. You'll notice most of this is blank right now because I haven't got course content posted there yet. except for the bit of introductory stuff.

Another platform or area that you'll be visiting a lot is the sqlite.org website. sqlite is going to be the database we use for the course and there's a few areas that you're going to use a lot like looking at the syntax diagrams for SQL and we'll be doing probably our first assignment we'll play with this a little bit. and get you used to it.

Again, you know, I'll point out that one of the things that you guys will probably have to do for one assignment and a final project is to make a screen capture video to demonstrate your work. And pay attention to us being able to see a mouse pointer. You can see I've made, hopefully made the mouse pointer big enough that you can see it on the video.

And depending on what you're demonstrating, you may have to, for example, kick up the font size. so that, you know, we can see what you want us to be able to see. If you're just trying to illustrate the shape of a website like this, at this point, I may not expect you to be able to read the text on the video, but you can see kind of the overall shape of the webpage.

Okay, so let me go back to the talking head here. So the other thing I want to do today is just... look at some highlights from the course outline and so that you can understand how the course is going to be administered and in particular how you're going how your grades are going to be computed that's usually the thing that's most of most interest to people when they look at the course outline okay so let's go back to the course content website and there's a section called the course outline so I'll click there and we'll take a look at it again let me kick up the font a little bit So you'll notice, yes, there are official class times, but the only use of those class times is going to be the online quizzes that happen every other week.

Everything else is asynchronous. The lectures will be posted whenever, some new content every week, but not synchronously with the class times. So you can do this course completely online from a remote location. There's no in-person activity that you have to show up for. There's the calendar description of the course, and their calendar descriptions are usually pretty vague.

I've tried to give a little bit more of a detailed description of topics, and typically this list of topics is kind of what we got to do the last offering. and that'll serve as a template for where we're going to go. There's no official textbook for the course, but the one that I use some examples from is the El-Mazri and Navath Fundamentals of Database Systems, which is probably in, I don't know, it's 9th or 10th edition.

Who knows? It's a very popular book. One of the... Running examples in the PowerPoint presentations and video lectures comes from this book. And that's on purpose.

It's not just because I'm too lazy to make up my own example. I want to use an example where if you need more explanation that I'm providing in the lectures and you want to read more about this running example, then that would be a good reason to get the book. So I'm purposely doing one.

running example throughout the course which is taken from this particular book. It doesn't matter which edition you get. Any edition will probably be fine because the example stuff we're talking about is fairly basic in the world of databases. It doesn't rely on the latest thing that's happening this year.

So again, textbooks are expensive and don't rush out and buy the book if you don't think you need it. I think the notes that we provide are sufficient for most people, but if you really are someone who likes to have a very detailed discussion of an example, then that would be the one I would suggest for you. Again, please pay attention to the copyright of the material that we post, and don't repost it somewhere else. The software that we're using, this is an OS agnostic course. You can run the course on Windows or Mac or Linux.

Probably not Chrome. Probably not a Chromebook because, I mean, I don't know how much development you can do on Chromebooks. The main piece of development software is going to be the SQLite database.

Although as the project for the course, I'm going to ask you to wrapper that database in some sort of an app. technology of your choosing. People have used in the past, they've used Python that they learned in first year.

They've used the technology from the web dev course 2406, or you can use the technology from the Java course, comp 1406. All programming languages have some kind of wrapper that speaks to an SQLite database. SQLite, you know it's safe to say that SQLite is the world's most popular database. By that I mean there are more instances of SQLite running than all other known databases combined, and I mean by a long shot.

So all programming languages tend to have a hook into speaking to an SQLite database file. And one of the things I'll ask you to do for your project is to investigate your favorite programming language and build something that then speaks to the database. We'll probably do some examples that are based on the Comp 2406 technology, but I'm not expecting you to have necessarily taken that course. It's not a prerequisite for this one. Okay.

In this course, your assignments will be a combination of programming and design work, written work. And Pay very careful attention to what formats I'm asking for you to submit the work in, especially the written work. Typically I'll ask you to producing some sort of PDF document and an organized document, not a bunch of loose files that we're supposed to sift through. Pay very careful attention to the format requirements because generally the marking scheme will be if you don't adhere to the format requirements and the grade is automatically zero. We won't use any of the TA resources to mark things that don't comply with the formats that we're asking for in the assignment.

So it's crucial to pay attention to those things. You'll likely have to make a screen capture video with some one or two places in the course probably for one assignment and for your project So for that, you know use some sort of screen capture software most operating systems have some kind of free version I'm using QuickTime here on the Mac. It's free on the Mac. I think Windows has Game bar or something like that, but you know, that's not a typically a big deal and You will be zipping up your content for submission to Brightspace and we're only accepting zip format. So don't start using other formats like RAR or TAR or whatever.

Only the zip stuff will be accepted. And again, I'll make that clear in the description of the assignments. Again, we'll be using Brightspace for the assignment submission.

And again, Brightspace enforces deadlines. And when you pass the deadline, further submission is not possible. Okay, so let's talk about the marking scheme.

This is probably the part that's most interesting at this stage. So the assignments are going to make up half the course mark, and there's going to be five term assignments and one project. Of the five term assignments, we're going to count the best four. And for the quizzes, the quizzes are going to make up 35% on the mark. And there's going to be six quizzes and we're going to count the best five out of six.

Now, this is very important. You'll notice that there's a little bit of slack. You can miss a couple of deliverables.

And that's the mechanism we're using to account for people getting sick or something. So it's very important to understand there's no medical notes, no doctor's notes, no self-assessments. You don't get extension. There's no extensions.

You don't get extensions if you're sick or something like that. What happens instead is that we won't count all the deliverables. Specifically, we'll give you a free assignment and a free quiz. If you drop below that deliverable, you're basically dropping below 80% roughly of the course deliverables. And I'm not willing to...

give out a mark that is an average of deliverables that account for less than 80% of the course deliverables. Okay, so basically there's five assignments. You get one free one. There are six quizzes. You get one free one.

The only thing that's not free where you don't get a free one is the project. You have to submit the project. Now, the project requirements will be posted very early and we'll encourage you to submit drafts as we go along. so that if you did get sick two days before the due time for the final project, you should have something already submitted and that will make up your grade. There's no exam in the course, so the assessment of the test-like assessment is all based on the bi-weekly tests.

I like that approach because it kind of chunks up the topics a little bit so that you don't have this exam that covers the whole course at the end, that kind of thing. So again in red here, very important, you may miss one assignment and one test for medical compassion or whatever reasons. We're not asking you for the reasons.

If you miss more than that, a mark of zero is going to be used in its place. Now if you're really sick and you start missing more than that, well probably there's more things going on in your life than this course. And if you're dropping to below those deliverables, then you're probably going to be better off to just withdraw and then come back and start again when your situation is resolved. Okay, so again we will not be collecting doctor's note or medical assessments for missed work.

There will be no extensions based on medical situations. The slack is based on us not counting all the deliverables. The other thing to be very important, very aware of, is that we will have a specific number of days in which you have to appeal a mark once we've posted it. Typically, it'll be 10 days after we post a mark.

If you're unhappy with your mark, you need to appeal within that window. Otherwise, we won't be going back in time. to earlier work to deal with appeals. Okay, and again, the appeal, you'll make the appeal with the marking TA first. And once the TA has responded, if you're not happy with the response, then I'll get involved and review that as well.

But I'm hoping this can be resolved with the marking TA in most cases. Okay, so there'll be a course webpage as we talked about or that you're looking at here. And it's... you can access it through Brightspace. So you have to have access to Brightspace.

You have to be registered in the course to know where to look for the course content website. There's a bunch of stuff that the university policies and again I'll just zoom down to the bottom of this where you notice I've put in red and scratched out some of the typical policy to remind you that this course In this course, we're not using medical notes or self declarations. Instead, the marking scheme allows you to miss a certain number of deliverables. And, and if again, if your situation gets more grave than that, then then you've got more problems probably than worrying about this course.

Okay, so that's the go back to the talking head here. So that's a quick tour of how the course will be administered. Again, this course can be done entirely online.

The format of the course was kind of developed during COVID restrictions where things had to be online, but now this is a choice to continue with some of our course offerings at Carleton to be online. We found that students actually like a mix of in-person courses and an opportunity to do some work online. meaning usually that it's a bit more asynchronous.

It's easier to fit into your schedule of other things that you're trying to do. One of the things I discovered during COVID with the online courses is that it's important to keep a regular rhythm in the course. And the rhythm can't just be the professor posting new content every week.

It's got to have deliverables that have a rhythm to them. And so the rhythm of this course is there's something for you to submit every week. And they'll be alternating between assignments and quizzes. So there's something, there's a deliverable every week.

And that keeps up a rhythm of the topics. And what I'm hoping works in your favor is that the quizzes will focus on the topics that are currently being covered in the course, rather than having a big exam. covers everything in the course at the end. I don't recall people ever having issues installing SQLite. It's a very simple little binary that you install and it gives you a command line interface and then it'll be up to you to investigate how you might want to access that with your favorite programming language or your favorite programming technology.

Okay, so I'll sign off there and just again say welcome everybody. Keep your eye, especially in the first week or so, with links that we post for how office hours will work as we set up schedules. And like I said, we'll probably use Zoom for the office hours. So again, the main platforms that you'll use in this course is Brightspace for the course admin stuff, the course content website, Zoom for office hours, some YouTube stuff, both for, you know, listening and watching the lectures and possibly for you to post. a screen capture video, and then the SQLite database that we'll be talking about extensively throughout the course.

So you'll notice I haven't mentioned anything about a Discord server. We're not going to have an official Discord server in the course. I want you to use the Brightspace forums that we create for the question and answer.

Now in the past when we've done that, when we've not had a Discord server, the students sometimes create one of their own. which is fine, but just be aware that myself and the TAs won't be joining that Discord server. That would be unfair and it'll discourage you from paying attention to the official question and answer area of the course. Okay, so we cannot answer questions in your private Discord server if you choose to set one up.

Okay, so Keep your eyes open for regular weekly task and deliverable emails from me and it'll summarize what we are working on and important links that you should be visiting and let's get going. Okay, bye for now.

Transcript for:Overview of Comp 3005 Course Structure

Transcript for:
Overview of Comp 3005 Course Structure