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INFR08022 Computer Programming: Skills and Concepts (CP)
and MUSI09001 Computer Programming for Music Technology (CPMT).

This course provides a gradual but in-depth introduction to imperative programming using the C programming language. It is intended for students who are not taking Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence as part of their degree. Our lectures (2 a week) are backed up with a scripted (and supervised) two-hour Lab and a one-hour tutorial, every week. The assessment will be based on a 3-hour online programming exam in December (worth 90%) and one coursework due in week 9 (10%).

Contents

• News
• People
• Course info, Software used, etc.
• Timetable
• Calendar
• Assessment
• Past Exam Papers
• Course Text
• Practising on your own machine

News

• (18 Nov) The marks and automatic feedback for the mock exam, together with the paper and template files, are now available here.
• (22 Oct) The coursework is out now! Here is the specification and files needed (cwk.tar).
  For questions, use Piazza. Coursework is due at 16:00 sharp on Friday 18 November (for CP and CPMT students).
• Mid-semester feedback: we'd appreciate it if you would fill in a short (anonymous) feedback questionnaire.
• We've been looking at progress through the labs, and there are fair number of you who need more time on the first part of the course before we go on and give you more C to learn. So we've rearranged the schedule, pushing weeks 6-10 back a week. Week 6 will now be a catch-up week for those who need it:
  • The lectures will not be lectures as such, but will continue the style of lecture 10 by discussing (with live coding) how we approach problems. You are encouraged to come along to these and throw problems at the lecturers to do (e.g. lab problems you're stuck on, or even past exam questions). Students who are completely confident needn't turn up, but we will try to show you some handy tricks too, such as how to use a debugger.
  • The labs (labelled as Week 5, so taking place on Thursday of week 5 and Mon/Tue of week 6) will mainly for those who need the time to catch up, but we'll provide a sheet of (more difficult) problems for anybody who is fully caught up and would like a little extra programming challenge.
  • The tutorials are unspecified, and can be used however you wish.
• If you haven't already, please do sign up to Piazza and make use of it for any questions you have.
• We provide a ‘dashboard’ which lets you keep an eye on your progress through the labs. Ideally, everything on it will be green by the end of the course! Your tutors and lecturers can see it too; however, it's for your benefit, and does not carry any marks. You can find it at
  • https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcb/CP-dashboard/
  If your code isn't showing green, and you don't understand why after reading the report, ask your tutor or one of us. If you think there's a mistake in dashboard, mail jcb.
• No news so far.

People

Lecturers are Julian Bradfield (Course Organizer), Kenneth Heafield and Mahesh Marina.

The Year Organizer, who is the person who grants extensions, is Paul Anderson.

The class reps for 2016/17 are on this restricted page.

• In case of illness or other Special Circumstances during the semester, please contact the Year Organiser Paul Anderson
• For problems with Tutorial/Lab allocations (or other administrative issues), please complete the ITO Contact Form, selecting "Service course", and mentioning CP.
• For computing problems (things like equipment in the FH labs, etc), please put in a message to "Computing Support" using the following form:
  Computing Support Form
  There is a FAQ answering common questions, and other important information, on their main page.
• For any other administrative issues or questions, please email Julian Bradfield.
• If you have any feedback/issues about the course, please talk to (or email) one of the class reps.

Course info, Software used, etc.

• In the exam, we give you a quick reference sheet for C. You should familiarize yourself with this before the exam, and you might also find it useful to have with you while working on labs etc. It is cref.pdf.
• We use the Descartes package for labs/coursework - this page has information and files to download.
• The DRPS entry for CP (including syllabus, exam/coursework weightings, etc) is here.
• The DRPS entry for CPMT (including syllabus, (different) exam/coursework weightings, etc) is here
• We do not assume any previous programming experience, only a logical mind and an appetite for hard work.
• Here is the 2014/15 survey report for CP, compiled from the responses submitted by the CP students in 2014/15. The results are mostly good, though we have some improvements to make.

Timetable

CP/CPMT is taught in semester 1. It is taught as a combination of two Lectures:

• 14:10 on Mondays, in Lecture Theatre 3 of Appleton Tower
• 11:10 on Tuesdays, this time in Lecture Hall A of David Hume Tower Lecture Theatres.

It also includes a (compulsory) scripted and supervised Lab (from Thursday, week 1 onwards) in Lab 3.D02 in the Forrest Hill building.

• 10:00-11:50 Thursday
• OR 15:10-17:00 Monday
• OR 12:10-14:00 Tuesday

We are not currently maintaining the list of Lab allocations, as we have enough space for students to turn up to whichever lab suits them.

It also includes a 1-hour Tutorial (from week 3 onwards).
Tutorial allocations are at this page.

Some students report security warnings when they try to access this link. This is because the University certifies its own secure pages, rather than using a commercial provider. Most Internet browsers will offer an link to bypass the security-warning, if you look closely. If you really can't see a way to do that, try a different browser (eg switch from Explorer and try with Chrome instead). You will see this problem with all University secure sites if you access them from a private machine, so it's worth installing the University's certificate in your browser. For instructions on this, see Information Services' page.

You can change your Tutorial allocation (if there is room) at student.inf.ed.ac.uk.

Problems with Lab/Tutorial allocations should be sent to Rob Armitage (rarmitag@inf.ed.ac.uk).

Calendar

We will keep a log of our lectures, and the collection of log entries will be maintained here. Individual log entries (once written) will be available as direct links from the lecture titles in the schedule below.

Meeting	Day	Date	Who	Where	Title	Slides & Handouts	Code
Week 1
1.	Monday	19 Sept	JCB/KH/MM	AT.LT3	Introduction to CP (log)	sl1, sl1x4	hello.c
2.	Tuesday	20 Sept	JCB	DHT.LHA.	Imperative programming, operations, errors (log)	sl2, sl2x4
Lab 1	Thur22/Mon26/Tues27			FH 3.D02	Intro to the DICE Environment (log)	lab1.pdf, lab1-2up.pdf, fwunixref.pdf, emacs.pdf
Week 2
3.	Monday	26 Sept	JCB	AT.LT3	Variables and ints (log)	sl3, sl3x4	square.c, max.c
4.	Tuesday	27 Sept	JCB	DHT.LHA	Arithmetic operations, int, float, double (log)	sl4, sl4x4	floats.c, quadratic.c
Lab 2	Thur29/Mon3/Tues4			FH 3.D02	Simple arithmetic problems (log)	lab2.pdf, lab2-2up.pdf
Week 3
Tutorial			Tutor		week 3 sheet	tutwk3.pdf t3sol.txt	tutw3b.c, tutw3c.c
5.	Monday	3 Oct	JCB	AT.LT3	arithmetic, if-statement(cont.) (log)	sl5, sl5x4	quadratic.c, quadratic2.c
6.	Tuesday	4 Oct	JCB	DHT.LHA	iteration: for and while (log)	sl6, sl6x4	table.c, fib.c, fib-for.c, lect6code.tar
Lab 3	Thur6/Mon10/Tues11			FH 3.D02	Programming, with some iteration (log)	lab3.pdf, lab3-2up.pdf
Week 4
Tutorial			Tutor		week 4 sheet (log)	tutwk4.pdf tutsoln4.pdf	week4sol.tar
7.	Monday	10 Oct	KH	AT.LT3	Functions (log)	sl7, sl7x4	days.c days2.c
8.	Tuesday	11 Oct	KH	DHT.LHA	Functions 2 (log)	sl8, sl8x4	global.c, scope2.c
Lab 4	Thur13/Mon17/Tues18			FH 3.D02	Simple Graphics with descartes (log)	lab4.pdf, lab4-2up.pdf	lab4 files
Week 5
Tutorial			Tutor		week 5 sheet	tutwk5.pdf tutsoln5.pdf	week5sol.tar
9.	Monday	17 Oct	MM	AT.LT3	Arrays (log)	sl9, sl9x4	fib-arr.c, whatday3.c, swap.c
10.	Tuesday	18 Oct	JCB	DHT.LHA	Practical Programming (log)	sl10, sl10x4, Extra video lecture (10 mins, 30 MB)	base.c
Lab	Thur20/Mon24/Tues25			FH 3.D02	Catch-up labs / extra problems	lab45.pdf, lab45-2up.pdf
Week 6
Tutorial			Tutor		catch-up tutorial	tutwk6.pdf t6sol.txt	base.c fbase.c
11.	Monday	24 Oct	JCB	AT.LT3	More practical programming / consolidation (log)	sl11, sl11x4	base-endoflecture.c, base-with-array.c roman.c,charstuff.c
12.	Tuesday	25 Oct	KH	DHT.LHA	More practical programming / consolidation (log)	sl12, sl12x4	art.c, primes.c, primes_return.c
Lab 5	Thur27/Mon31/Tues1			FH 3.D02	Functions, some pointers, some arrays (log)	lab5.pdf, slides8-2015.pdf
Week 7
Tutorial			Tutor		week 7 sheet	tutwk7.pdf t7sol.txt	base.c fbase.c
13.	Monday	31 Oct	MM	AT.LT3	scanf in more detail; char (log)	sl13, sl13x4	roman.c,charstuff.c
14.	Tuesday	1 Nov	MM	DHT.LHA	Strings (log)	sl14, sl14x4	hiyacoders.c
Lab 6	Thur3/Mon7/Tues8			FH 3.D02	Arrays and some strings	lab6.pdf, lab6-2up.pdf
Week 8
Tutorial			Tutor		week 8 sheet	tutwk8.pdf t8sol.txt	tutw8a.c
15.	Monday	7 Nov	KH	AT.LT3	Structured Data (log)	sl15, sl15x4	typedef.c, struct.c, struct2.c, enum.c
16.	Tuesday	8 Nov	KH	DHT.LHA	Structured Data, cont.; enums; switch (log)	Same slides, more demo	primes_enum.c, pets.c
Lab 7	Thur10/Mon14/Tues15			FH 3.D02	mock exam
Week 9
Tutorial			Tutor		no tutorial sheet - discuss mock	tutwk9.pdf tutsoln9.pdf	bubblesort.c, mergerec.c
17.	Monday	14 Nov	JCB	AT.LT3	Searching and sorting (log)	sl17, sl17x4	search.c, bubblesort.c
18.	Tuesday	15 Nov	JCB	DHT.LHA	Recursion (including mergesort) (log)	sl18, sl18x4	mergerec.c
Lab	Thur17/Mon21/Tues22			FH B.LT1	Structured data types	lab7.pdf, lab7-2up.pdf	running.c
Week 10
Tutorial			Tutor		week 10 sheet	tutwk10.pdf	sidebyside.c
19.	Monday	21 Nov	MM	AT.LT3	Libraries and Separate Compilation	sl19, sl19x4
20.	Tuesday	22 Nov	MM	DHT.LHA	Files in C	sl20, sl20x4
Lab 8	Thur24/Mon28/Tues29			FH 3.D02	Recursion and some File work	lab8.pdf, lab8-2up.pdf
Week 11
Tutorial			Tutor		Mock exam Qs; Files and Arguments	see prev sheet
21.	Monday	28 Nov	JCB	AT.LT3	Program Arguments, More C; Mock exam feedback	sl21, sl21x4 , slM, slMx4	arg.c
22.	Tuesday	29 Nov		DHT.LHA	No Lecture
No Lab				FH 3.D02		Dec 2011

Assessment

Your grade for CP will depend on two components. The first part will be a single electronically-submitted piece of coursework, issued on Friday 21 October (end week 5), and due by 16:00, Friday 18 November (end week 9). This work is worth 10% of your overall grade. The second is the final exam, carried out as a computer-based programming test held in the computer labs, taking place at the the end of semester 1. This final exam is worth 90% of your overall grade.

The (due end week 9) coursework must also be completed by CMPT students and is worth 10% of their grade also. However, the weighting of the exam is slightly different - it is worth only 70%, with the remaining 20% depending on the extra piece of practical work for CPMT students, done with the Music department in week 11.

Past Exam Papers

All of the past exam papers can be viewed in the Exam paper repository held by the University library: the Library Exam Papers site. Search for Computer Programing: Skills and Concepts from December 2011 onwards (the "CP1" papers are not relevant).

For the past main diet exams (and one re-sit), we have made available the template files and also the automarker that was used to mark the exam:

• Here is the 2011 exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.
• Here is the 2011/12 resit exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.
• Here is the 2012 exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.
• Here is the 2013 exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.
• Here is the 2014 exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.
• Here is the 2015 exam (paper and templates), together with an automarker.

Course Text

"A Book on C: Programming in C", 4th edition; by Al Kelley and Ira Pohl.

Practising on your own machine

• C Compiler for Windows: See here for how to install a C compiler to support C programming on your own (Windows) computer.
• If you have a Macbook, you can download the gcc compiler from the xcode library available free to Apple developers.
• The School's Virtual DICE services lets you run a virtual DICE computer on your own machine.