CMSC 131 - Object Oriented Programming I

Class Announcements

• 11/29/2018
  • Project 7 (Fish Club) has been posted.


• 11/10/2018
  • Project 6 (Cafe 131) has been posted.


• 10/30/2018
  • Project 5 (Poker Simulator) has been posted.


• 10/20/2018
  • Project 4 (Mandelbrot Set) has been posted.


• 10/09/2018
  • Project 3 (Medieval Soldiers) has been posted.
• 
  09/23/2018
  • Project 2 (Flags of the World) has been posted.
• 
  09/13/2018
  • Project 1 (Orioles Baseball) has been posted.
• 
  09/07/2018
  • The lecture slides are posted under the Schedule tab.
  • I have included the calculation for finding the range of a data type in today's lecture slides. Sorry for the confusion in the class.


• 09/05/2018
  • The deadline for Project 0 has been extended. The new due date is 09/12 at 11:00 PM.
  • This is where class announcements will be posted. Please check this page regularly.

Schedule

Exam Dates:

• Midterm #1: Monday, October 8th, in Lecture.
• Midterm #2: Monday, November 19th, in Lecture.
• Final Exam: Thursday, December 13th, 4:00 - 6:00 PM, Location: LEF 2205

Lectures (Tentative)

Staff

Instructor: Mohammad Nayeem Teli (nayeem at cs.umd.edu)

Office: 1351 AV Williams
Office Hours: MWF 4:00 - 5:00 PM

Teaching Assistants

TA Office Hours

All TA office hours take place in room 1112 A.V. Williams. Please note that a TA may need to leave 5 minutes before the end of the hour in order to go to his/her class. Please be understanding of their schedules.

Class Resources

Starting this semester, all students will be required to sign up for and use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access a variety of services that use your university login. Resources such as ELMS and the class grades.cs.umd.edu server are among these. That means that before October 15th, you need to set up MFA. It is the very strong recommendation of your instructor that you set this up earlier, by September 15th, to get it out of the way since access to resources such as these are essential. The campus page about this is at https://it.umd.edu/MFA.

• Grades Server - This is where you go to see grades on assignments and to get your class account information.
• Submission Server - This is where you go to view your project submissions and to get limited feedback about how your project is performing on our automated tests.
• Eclipse tutorial - Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that helps us to write software efficiently. You will use Eclipse to implement the class projects this semester. See the section at the bottom of this page for specific information about setting up Eclipse.

• Oracle's Java homepage - This is the place to come when you really need the latest technical specs and downloads.
• Oracle's Java tutorial - This page has a number of links to books and web pages about Java, which you may find of interest.
• Java 8.0 API specs - This page contains (javadoc) documentation for the Java libraries. It is an excellent reference and you should bookmark it on your browser.

In order to complete the projects for this course you must install Eclipse following the instructions in the Eclipse Tutorial. Note that if you install Eclipse from some other source then you will not be able to submit your projects easily! After you get Eclipse installed, you will need to connect Eclipse to your class account. Below is a screenshot of the information you will need to enter into the CVS connection dialog box during this process. You can cut and paste the following lines into the dialog box:

• Host:
  grace.umd.edu


• Repository Path:
  /afs/glue/class/fall2018/cmsc/131/0501/student/*****
  
  (Replace "*****" with your login ID.)
  
  Be sure to change the connection type to "extssh", as shown below

Study Questions

Below are collections of questions and practice problems that are designed to help you to learn the course material. These exercises are not being collected or graded. Answers are provided, but please try your best to solve each problem before looking at the solution! The list will be updated as the semester progresses.

Disclaimer

Projects

To submit a project, go to the "Java" perspective in Eclipse. Right click on the project folder (e.g., p1) and select "Submit Project" from the pull-down menu. If you do not see the "Submit Project" option then your copy of Eclipse does not contain the class plug-ins. In this case, please see the Eclipse installations instructions on the Resources page, or drop by TA office hours for help.

You may submit many times (we grade only the last submission). You can check the status of your submissions by visiting the Submit Server Home Page and entering your University Directory ID and password.

Important

Click the name of a project below to see the project specification.

Open/Closed Policy

Guidelines for ALL Projects

There are a few simple rules that you should keep in mind for all of our coding assignments, regardless of whether they are "open" or "closed":

• Under no circumstances may you copy code from another student or from any other source.
• Under no circumstances should you be viewing source-code written by other students in the class.
• It is always OK to openly discuss course-wide policies on things like programming style, grading, submissions, etc.
• It is always OK to openly discuss the project specification. Be careful though -- here we are talking about WHAT the project description requires you to implement, not HOW the code will be written! On closed projects the "HOW" portion is off-limits for discussion (except for discussions with the instructor or TAs).

Closed Projects

You should treat a closed project as though it were a take-home exam. You may ask for assistance from your instructor or any of the TAs, but you are not to discuss the implementation (HOW the code is written) with anyone else. This includes your class-mates, friends, family, etc.

Open Projects

Although you should always try to complete as much of an open project as you can on your own, you MAY discuss the implementation details (the "HOW") openly with anyone. However, you must write 100% of the code on your own without copying from any source. Looking directly at another student's source-code is forbidden, but on an open project you are free to discuss ideas on HOW the code is to be written.

Open Projects

Below are some "example scenarios" to help you understand what is okay and what is not. Imagine you are considering the following conversations with a classmate. The green checkmarks mean the conversation is OK, the red X's mean you would be violating the course policy -- these would be considered examples of academic dishonesty.

Something you might say...	Open Project	Closed Project
"What does the project description mean by 'Use symbolic constants'?"
"Are we allowed to submit the project as many times as we want?"
"It says 'maintain a sorted list' -- how are we supposed to keep the list sorted?"
"I can't get my shape to rotate properly! Can you give me a hint on how you got that to work?"
"I've been working on this method for hours and I can't figure out what's wrong! Could you look at my code and help me out?"
"I can't figure this part out -- can I look at your code to see how you did it?"
"I wrote some useful tests for this project -- let me email them to you so you can use them to see if your code is working correctly."