Welcome to CMPT 166 Summer 2012’s documentation!

This is a first course in computer programming, and is meant for people with an interest in interactive graphics and animation. No previous experience or knowledge of computer programming is needed.

Weekly Lectures

Weekly lectures occur 9:30am to 10:30am every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in room 2740 (Surrey). You should attend every lecture. If you miss a lecture, then it is your responsibility to find out what you missed.

The lectures follow the schedule below.

Office Hours and Email

The teaching assistant (TA) is:

• Ruiwen Chen (ruiwenc@sfu.ca)

The course instructor is Toby Donaldson (tjd@sfu.ca). Feel free to email him any time to ask questions. His office hours are every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:30am to 12:20pm, and 1pm to 2pm in room 4108 (Surrey).

Sometimes we will send you email via the course mailing list. Check the 166 mailing list archive if you miss a message.

Please note that while we try to answer email as quickly as possible, we can’t promise immediate responses.

Weekly Labs

Weekly labs are every Wednesday from 10:30am to 12:30pm in room 4050 (Surrey). You should attend every lab. Some labs may cover specific course topics. If you miss a lab, then it is your responsibility to find out what you missed.

There are no labs (tutorials) in the first week of classes!

Here is a tentative list of lab topics:

• Lab 1: Wednesday May 16th
  • Using the Processing editor to enter and run programs.
• Lab 2: Wednesday May 23rd
  • Open lab: help with assignments.
• Lab 3: Wednesday May 30th
  • Debugging tips and techniques: dealing with errors; using println statements for debugging
• Lab 4: Wednesday June 6th
  • Open lab: help with assignments.
• Lab 5: Wednesday June 13th
  • Midterm exam preparation.
• Lab 6: Wednesday June 20th
  • Examples of using loops.
• Lab 7: Wednesday June 27th
  • Open lab: help with assignments.
• Lab 8: Wednesday July 4th
  • Examples of using arrays.
• Lab 9: Wednesday July 11th
  • Open lab: help with assignments.
• Lab 10: Wednesday July 18th
  • Examples of writing classes.
• Lab 11: Wednesday July 25th
  • Open lab: help with assignments.
• Lab 12: Wednesday August 1st
  • Final exam prep and assignment marking issues.

Marking Scheme

• 50% Assignments

  • Assignment 1 (10%; due Friday May 25th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 2 (10%; due Wednesday June 6th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 3 (10%; due Wednesday June 27th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 4 (10%; due Wednesday July 11th or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 5 (10%; due Wednesday July 25th at or before 11:59pm)

  Important: Sometimes instead of giving you a mark based on the assignment work you submit, we may replace an assignment with an oral quiz based on the assignment. Such a quiz is meant to test your understanding of what you submitted, and may ask you to do things like explain your work, make small changes to it, and so on. This is mainly to deal with suspected academic dishonesty issues, and so it may be applied either at random, or to specific individuals we suspect may not be following the course ethics guidelines.

  Occasionally it may be necessary to change a due date of an assignment. If that happens, you will be given as much advance notice as possible.

• 20% Midterm exam A 50-minute closed-book exam currently scheduled to be held Friday June 15th in the same place and at the same time as the lecture.

• 30% Final exam A comprehensive 3-hour closed-book exam on Friday August 10th, from 8:30am to 11:30am in room to be announced later. It will cover the entire course.

Note

Students must attain an overall passing grade on the weighted average of exams in the course in order to obtain a clear pass (C or better). The Grading FAQ explains what this means in more detail.

Your marks will be recorded in the on-line gradebook.

The Grading FAQ has answers to many commonly asked questions about final grades and how they may be calculated.

Ethics

All students in this course are expected to follow a few basic rules of ethical conduct:

• As a member of the Simon Fraser University community, you are bound by its Code of Academic Integrity and Good Conduct. Read it!
• Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all assignments and assessed activities must be your own original work. You must cite any help you get, whether it be from people (friends, TAs, instructors, your uncle who works at Microsoft), or from books, websites, magazines, and so on.
• You may of course work with others in an effort to understand the material, but you are responsible for mastering and understanding everything yourself.
• You may not share your assignments with other students in the course or not in the course. For instance, we consider it dishonest if you let another student read a program you have written, e.g. giving a friend a copy of your program so they can learn from it is not acceptable in this course.
• If you get the help of a tutor or assistant (e.g. someone who answers a question you ask on a web forum), or an academic assistance service of any kind, you must provide the following information:
  • Contact information.
  • A brief description of the nature of the assistance.
  • Copies of all materials given to the assistant.
  • Copies of all materials returned by the assistant.
• Markers may sometimes use software to check for suspicious assignments. Such programs simply flag suspicious files, and the marker will then manually investigate further to determine if any copying has occurred.
• Assignment extensions or deferrals are usually only granted for medical or compassionate reasons. For instance, we need a doctor’s note confirming that you are so unwell as to need an extension. A note that merely says you visited a doctor is not usually good enough.

Course Notes

• 1. Introduction to Programming with Processing
• 2. Our First Program
• 3. Smoothing, Coordinates, and Modes
• 4. Coloring and Mapping
• 5. Making Things Move
• 6. Detecting the Edges of the Screen
• 7. Bouncing Around the Screen
• 8. Hit Detection and Functions
• 9. Special Effect: Simulating Gravity
• 10. Special Effect: A Fading Circle
• 11. Special Effect: Dragging and Dropping
• 12. Special Effect: Throwing a Ball
• 13. Special Effect: Moving to a Specified Point
• 14. Strings
• 15. Fonts
• 16. Scrolling Text
• 17. Sound in Processing
• 18. Example: A Sound Effects Board
• 19. Translating and Rotating
• 20. OOP: Objected-oriented Programming
• 21. OOP: Bouncing Balls Revisited
• 22. Bouncing Balls, Lists, and Loops
• 23. Dots and Lines
• 24. Variations on Dots and Lines
• 25. Simulating Water with a Particle System
• 26. Case Study: Watching Grass Grow
• 27. Case Study: Playing with a Snake
• 28. Creating an Explosion
• 29. A Simple Sprite Class
• 30. An Exploding Hamburger
• 31. Making a Car
• 32. Animated Sprites
• 33. Glossary
• 34. Midterm Info
• 35. Final Exam Info
• 36. Grade FAQ

Processing Books

While you don’t need to buy any books for this course, if you do want more information and examples of Processing, here are a few Processing books you might be interested in:

• Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. A fun book for new programmers. Like this course, it starts out assuming you know nothing about programming. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. Reas and Fry invented Processing. Along with examples of basic usage of Processing functions, it has a number interesting interviews digital artists. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Getting started with Processing, by Casey Reas. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art by Ira Greenberg. Contains a number of good examples of sophisticated programming techniques. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing for Visual Artists: How to Create Expressive Images and Interactive Art by Andrew Glassner. A nice feature of this book is that it walks through a few sophisticated example programs.
• Generative Art, A Practical guide using Processing, by Matt Pearson. A short introduction to programming for artists interested in generative art.

The Processing website lists a number of other books. You can also buy Processing t-shirts!