Exercises

Exercise scripts

• The scripts of the exercises will be available on the web page (pdf's in the documents page) at least one week prior to the start of the exercise (normally, they will already be there at the semester start)

Important notes for the students

• Group tourism is not allowed over the semester (i.e. do not go to the exercise session corresponding to another group than yours)
• A maximum of two students may work together on an exercise (this is allowed, but not recommended), but each must hand in a report personally clearly stating with whom the exercise has been carried out
  
• Exercise reports handed in after the indicated deadlines will not be considered (i.e. will be neither corrected nor marked)
• There is no admission condition (Testat) for the exam. However, the results of your five best exercises are taken into account when evaluating the results of the exam (obligatorisches Leistungselement). More precisely, the average of your best five exercise grades will determine 12% of your final exam mark (0.72 points). In case of repetition of the exam, the exercise marks from a previous semester can be taken over. To maximize this contribution, respect the following rules:
  • Return at east five (preferably all six!) exercise reports
    
  • In case of justified absence (e.g. serious illness, military duties) over the semester, provide Prof. Hünenberger with a copy of an official (e.g. military or medical) document; the minimum number of exercises will be reduced accordingly
  • Do not copy exercise solutions from a colleague (as this is entirely useless in terms of learning effect)
• A current list of grades will be posted and updated regularly on this site (see exercise marks page); this list may also contain important messages from the lecturer or the assistants to the students (see legend/footnotes therein)
• To make the most out of these exercises, here are five extremely valuable advices:
  • Read the exercise scripts once before the exercise session (even if superficially); this is particularly important for exercises 1-4 (for these, if you do not do a first reading before the session, you will waste your time reading text rather than experimenting with the computer!)
  • Come to the exercise sessions in time and be ready to start at the session start; this will ensure that the sessions are really two hours, and will facilitate the job of your assistant
    
  • If you miss an exercise, you have to catch up rapidly (by still doing the exercise on your own); this is again particularly important for exercises 1-4 (these are sequential tutorials, and if you lack the material of one of them, you will have a hard time doing anything meaningful in the next ones)
  • It is more important to work on your own with the goal of learning/understanding, than just making sure at any cost (including copying) that you have good exercise marks; as written above, the exercise marks will contribute 12% of the exam mark, but the remaining 88% will solely depend on what you learned/understood!
  • The exercise scripts are supposed to be read/processed like "IKEA manuals", not like "20 Minutes"!  If you go for superficial/diagonal/last-minute reading, you may well save a bit of time on the reading, but you will lose all of it (and actually ten times more!) on solving the tasks, debugging your programs, and pulling your hair out with frustration. In short: self-disciplin in the reading/processing of the scripts is the path to self-enjoyment in the programming!