Welcome to CMPT 166 Fall 2013!

This is a first course in computer programming, and is meant for people with an interest in interactive graphics and animation. No previous experience or knowledge of computer programming is needed.

Weekly Lectures

Weekly lectures occur 9:30am to 10:30am every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in room 5280 (Surrey). You should attend every lecture. If you miss a lecture, then it is your responsibility to find out what you missed.

The lectures follow the schedule below.

Office Hours and Email

The teaching assistants (TAs) are:

• Sonny Myet (shm6@sfu.ca)
• Laura Li (xll@sfu.ca).

They are available during lab time.

The course instructor is John Edgar (johnwill@sfu.ca). Feel free to email him any time to ask questions. His office hours are every Monday and Wednesday, from 12:00 (noon) to 1:00 pm and 2:30pm to 3:30pm in room 4110 (Surrey). If you want to meet at some other time please make an appointment by email

Sometimes we will send you email via the course mailing list. Check the 166 mailing list archive if you miss a message.

Please note that while we try to answer email as quickly as possible, we can’t promise immediate responses.

Weekly Labs

Weekly labs are every Wednesday between 10:30am and 3:30pm in room 4050 (Surrey). There are 6 sections of labs and you should attend the lab that you registered for.

• D101 - 10:30 to 11:20 (Sonny)
• D102 - 11:30 to 12:20 (Laura)
• D103 - 12:30 to 13:20 (Laura)
• D104 - 13:30 to 14:20 (Laura)
• D105 - 14:30 to 15:20 (Sonny)
• D106 - 15:30 to 16:20 (sonny)

You should attend each week’s lab. Some labs may cover specific course topics. If you miss a lab, then it is your responsibility to find out what you missed.

There are no labs in the first week of classes!

Marking Scheme

• 40% Assignments

  • Assignment 1 (10%; due Wednesday September 25th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 2 (10%; due Monday October 14th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 3 (10%; due Wednesday November 6th at or before 11:59pm)
  • Assignment 4 (10%; due Wednesday November 27th at or before 11:59pm)

  Important: Sometimes instead of giving you a mark based on the assignment work you submit, we may replace an assignment with an oral quiz based on the assignment. Such a quiz is meant to test your understanding of what you submitted, and may ask you to do things like explain your work, make small changes to it, and so on. This is mainly to deal with suspected academic dishonesty issues, and so it may be applied either at random, or to specific individuals we suspect may not be following the course ethics guidelines.

  Occasionally it may be necessary to change a due date of an assignment. If that happens, you will be given as much advance notice as possible.

• 20% Midterm exam - a 50-minute closed-book exam held in class, on the 16th of October.

• 40% Final exam - a comprehensive 3-hour closed-book exam on Friday December 6th, from 12:00 to 3:00pm. It will cover the entire course.

Note

Students must attain an overall passing grade on the weighted average of exams in the course in order to obtain a clear pass (C- or better). The Grading FAQ explains what this means in more detail.

Your marks will be recorded in the on-line gradebook.

The Grading FAQ has answers to many commonly asked questions about final grades and how they may be calculated.

Ethics

All students in this course are expected to follow a few basic rules of ethical conduct:

• As a member of the Simon Fraser University community, you are bound by its Code of Academic Integrity and Good Conduct. Read it!
• Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all assignments and assessed activities must be your own original work. You must cite any help you get, whether it be from people (friends, TAs, instructors, your uncle who works at Microsoft), or from books, websites, magazines, and so on.
• You may of course work with others in an effort to understand the material, but you are responsible for mastering and understanding everything yourself.
• You may not share your assignments with other students in the course or not in the course. For instance, we consider it dishonest if you let another student read a program you have written, e.g. giving a friend a copy of your program so they can learn from it is not acceptable in this course.
• If you get the help of a tutor or assistant (e.g. someone who answers a question you ask on a web forum), or an academic assistance service of any kind, you must provide the following information:
  • Contact information.
  • A brief description of the nature of the assistance.
  • Copies of all materials given to the assistant.
  • Copies of all materials returned by the assistant.
• Markers may sometimes use software to check for suspicious assignments. Such programs simply flag suspicious files, and the marker will then manually investigate further to determine if any copying has occurred.
• Assignment extensions or deferrals are usually only granted for medical or compassionate reasons. For instance, we need a doctor’s note confirming that you are so unwell as to need an extension. A note that merely says you visited a doctor is not usually good enough.

Course Notes

• 1. Introduction to Programming with Processing
• 2. Our First Program
• 3. Smoothing, Coordinates, and Modes
• 4. Coloring and Mapping
• 5. Making Things Move
• 6. Detecting the Edges of the Screen
• 7. Bouncing Around the Screen
• 8. Hit Detection and Functions
• 9. Special Effect: Simulating Gravity
• 10. Special Effect: A Fading Circle
• 11. Special Effect: Dragging and Dropping
• 12. Special Effect: Throwing a Ball
• 13. Special Effect: Moving to a Specified Point
• 14. Strings
• 15. Fonts
• 16. Scrolling Text
• 17. Translating and Rotating
• 18. Polar Coordinates
• 19. For Loops
• 20. Sound in Processing
• 21. Example: A Sound Effects Board
• 22. OOP: Objected-oriented Programming
• 23. OOP: Bouncing Balls Revisited
• 24. Bouncing Balls, Lists, and Loops
• 25. While Loops
• 26. Dots and Lines
• 27. Simulating Water with a Particle System
• 28. Introduction to Image Processing
• 29. Creating an Explosion with a Particle System
• 30. Creating an Explosion with an Image
• 31. A Simple Sprite Class
• 32. Animated Sprites
• 33. (Extra) Case Study: Watching Grass Grow
• 34. (Extra) Case Study: Playing with a Snake
• 35. (Extra) The Finch Robot
• 36. (Extra) Making a Car
• 37. Samples
• 38. Glossary
• 39. Midterm Info
• 40. Final Exam Info
• 41. Grade FAQ

Processing Books

While you don’t need to buy any books for this course, if you do want more information and examples of Processing here are a few Processing books you might be interested in:

• Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. A fun book for new programmers. Like this course, it starts out assuming you know nothing about programming. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. Reas and Fry invented Processing. Along with examples of basic usage of Processing functions, it has a number interesting interviews digital artists. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Getting started with Processing, by Casey Reas. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art by Ira Greenberg. Contains a number of good examples of sophisticated programming techniques. It’s available as an e-book in the SFU library.
• Processing for Visual Artists: How to Create Expressive Images and Interactive Art by Andrew Glassner. A nice feature of this book is that it walks through a few sophisticated example programs.
• Generative Art, A Practical guide using Processing, by Matt Pearson. A short introduction to programming for artists interested in generative art.

The Processing website lists a number of other books. You can also buy Processing t-shirts!