Week 10 Lab ENGG1811

ENGG1811 Lab 10: Programming practice

Notice

Your final lab marks will be determined based on how effectively you answer during an interactive session with your tutor. If you are unable to provide adequate answers to questions on similar topics, it may indicate a lack of understanding, and marks will be deducted accordingly.

To prevent this, please ensure that your work is your own. Avoid copying partial or complete solutions from others or using generative AI.

Summary

All ENGG1811 students are required to sit an in-person exam in a CSE computer lab. In the exam, you will be asked to solve a number of Python programming problems. In this lab, you will be working on some programming questions to give you some practice for the exam.

Note that the same set of questions will be used for all the lab sessions this week. If you seriously want to check how you are doing, then you should not ask your classmates, who have attended an earlier lab, what the questions are.

Assessment: The tutor will assess how close your solutions are to working, and award an overall of 3 marks for reasonable attempt. There is no online assessment this week.

Note that some instructions for Lab 10 are different depending on whether you attend an in-person or online lab.

Exam environment

For your exam, you will be asked to log onto an exam environment to work on your exam. The set up of the exam environment is similar to what you would see if you log onto a CSE computer. You are not permitted to take the exam on your own device.

If you attend an in-person lab, you will be able to log onto the exam environment to do your Lab 10.

If you attend an online lab, you are not able to use the exam environment due to its set up so you will use your own computer to attend this lab. You will need to download an exam pack which is password protected. Your tutor will let you know the password. However, we recommend you log onto a CSE computer in a lab to get a feel of its environment sometime before the exam.

In the exam environment, you will have access:

The exam paper in pdf format.
Spyder for you to develop and test your programs.
A submission box (or Dragon Box) to submit your work.
A file browser which you will need to use to submit your work.
Exam resources, see the Section on Rules below for details.

In this video, I give you a tour of the exam environment based on what you will see in Lab 10. Unfortunately, the video capture was not able to show some visual details:

You can access the background menu by clicking on the blue background or the triangle to the left of the toolbar at the bottom of the window. The triangle did not show up clearly in the video but it is indicated in this picture.

In order to reshape the Spyder window, you need to hover the cursor near a corner of the Spdyer window until you see this cursor

(or a reflected version).

Rules

You are asked to complete the lab on your own, it must be your own work. No communications.

During this lab, as well as in your exam, you are allowed to consult these exam resources:

All lecture contents which include lecture slides and sample code.
A number of Python and numpy manuals.
The Python Tutorial (Release 3.8.14)
Reference on the Python math library functions
The NumPy User Guide (Release 1.23.0)
The NumPy Reference (Release 1.23.0)

This web page shows the lectures that you will be able to consult in Lab 10 and in the exam. If you are using the exam environment, you can access these resources within the environment. If you attend an online lab, you can use the link at the beginning of the paragraph to consult the resources. Note that these are the only materials that you can consult in this lab and in your exam. You are not allowed to bring in any of your own notes.

What to do

Have writing paper and a pen for drafting a solution or pseudo-code.

The tutor will conduct the lab this way:

Everyone keeps quiet as if it were a real exam. Have pen and paper ready.
Log onto the exam environment.
The tutor will give you 50 minutes to work on the two questions. Each question has multiple test cases. You should aim to pass as many test cases as you can.
At the end of the 50-minute period, the tutor will discuss the questions with you, and assess your work.

File testing: You can use the supplied test files to test your code in Spyder.

Submitting your work: In the exam, you will need to submit your work in the exam via a submission box. For this lab, submission is optional. If you are attending an in-person lab, you may wish to attempt it. If you are attending an online lab, the video mentioned in Exam Environment has a demonstration of the submission process.

(The submission instructions) For submission, you need to open both the submission box and the file browser. You can open both using the background menu by clicking on the blue background. To submit, drag the file from the file browser to the submission box. The submission box will run the test cases and show you the results.

Exam Pack

In case you are not able to attend the lab in Week 10, we will make the exam pack (not password protected) available here at the end of Week 10. The exam pack is here.

At the End of the Lab

We hope you find your journey on learning computing with us rewarding, both intellectually and practically. We understand that you're not majoring in computing but we do deeply believe that computing is both a powerful concept as well as tool which is useful for many disciplines. Never stop learning as it is one of the great joys and beauties of life. All the best.

If you have completed everything, please do not forget to logout from the exam environment.