CS 161

Homework Resources

Here are a few homework guidelines and pieces of advice that Prof. Mary Wootters gives to her CS 161 students, which also pertain to this offering.

• Guidelines One of the big skills you'll be developing in CS161 is how to communicate technical material clearly. To that end, we expect homework sets in CS161 to be clear, and easily human-readable. Think of them like memos you might write to a colleague. Better still, think of them as memos that you might write for a team of colleagues, who may be working quickly and also who have control over your grade. Your homeworks should be typed and clearly written with complete sentences and well-organized logic, and should definitely not be your first draft. When we ask for pseudocode, we are expecting pseudocode that is clear enough that a CS106B student (and certainly the grader) can understand what your algorithm is doing, and could implement it in a language of their choice, without thinking too hard. It is good practice to include an English description of what your pseudocode is doing, to help out the reader. See the example homework before for good and bad examples of pseudocode.
• Homework 0 To help you get an idea of what we are expecting, Homework 0 is worth 0% of your grade and Homework 0 solutions will be released 7/3.
• HW Tips
  • Look at Homework 0 solutions for style advice.
  • Try to put yourself in the position of the reader. If you hadn't just been thinking about this problem for two hours, would your answer make sense to you?
  • The homework questions will always end with a text block explaining what sort of answer we expect. Read this text block carefully.
  • Start the homework early.
  • Try to "finish" the homework early, step away from it for a day, and then come back to it and read it over again. Chances are, you'll find some way to write what you've written more clearly.
  • If you get stuck, then ask for help from the course staff: come to office hours prepared to explain what you have tried, and why you are stuck.