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Labs

This semester, we have weekly labs. Labs introduce exercises to apply concepts from lectures to concrete problems and they often provide concrete suggestions for tooling and notation.

We release lab assignments several days before the lab sessions on Wednesdays. Lab assignments are typically intended to take less than one hour of work per week, but they can take longer if you face technical difficulties or struggle with lecture concepts. You should attempt the lab assignment before the lab session, but if you have questions or face problems you can attend the lab session with incomplete work and continue working on it with the help of TAs during the lab session.1 Note that you are unlikely to have enough time to complete the work during the lab session if you do not start before the lab session.

Each lab assignment has one or more concrete deliverables, each worth one point. You get points for labs by showing your work to a TA during the weekly lab session. Typically showing your work involves showing source code, demoing executions, and (verbally) answering a few questions.2 We intend labs to be very low stakes – this is your first practical engagement with the material and mistakes are a normal part of the learning process. Deliverables are graded pass/fail on whether they meet the stated requirements. If your solution does not meet the requirements you can continue working on it during the lab session until it does.

At the end of the lab session, we will discuss possible solutions.

Collaboration policy

In contrast to homework assignments, we have a very relaxed collaboration policy for labs. You can work together with other students both before the lab session and during the lab session. While we do not recommend it, you may look at other students’ solutions and reference solutions and even copy them. However, you will have to present and explain your solution to the TA on your own.

Footnotes

  1. If it takes you more than one hour to complete the lab assignment, we recommend to stop and take your incomplete solution to the lab session where TAs can help you to complete the work.

  2. The TA may ask a few questions about your implementation to probe that you understand your work. If deliverables do not require coding or drawing but instead ask to answer a question (e.g., what best practices are violated in a piece of code) we expect that you give the answer verbally to the TA (you are welcome to type out notes to prepare the answer if you like).