FA20 Syllabus
Fall 2020
Course Staff
Alanna's OH on Nov 7 Saturday will be moved to Nov 12 Thursday 1:30pm EST.
Name
Title
Office Hours
Location
Alanna Zhou
Instructor
Saturdays 2-3pm EST
Alicia Wang
Instructor
Sundays 2-3pm EST
Jack Greenberg
TA
Saturdays 1-2pm EST
Yuna Shin
TA
Sundays 10am-11pm EST
Orko Sinha
Consultant
--
--
Raahi Menon
Consultant
--
--
Manish Saha
Consultant
--
--
Schedule
This schedule is tentative and subject to changes to Cornell's Fall 2020 academic calendar.
Lecture Date
Topic
Project
Project Due Date
9/21
Routes
9/27
9/28
Databases
Venmo (Basic)
10/4
10/5
Relational Databases
Venmo (Full)
10/18
10/19
Abstractions
CMS
10/25
-
Break :)
-
-
10/26
Containerization
Dockerize CMS
11/1
11/2
Deployment
Deploy CMS
11/8
11/16
Authentication
N/A
N/A
During break
Images (Demo)
N/A
N/A
N/A
Hack Challenge (No Lecture)
Midpoint Submission
12/6
N/A
Hack Challenge (No Lecture)
Final Submission
12/13
12/14
Hack Challenge Finale
N/A
N/A
Enrollment
You can enroll yourself into the course like any other on Student Center. This is a 2-credit S/U course, however we permit students to enroll for 1-credit for the purpose of avoiding a credit overload petition. All students are expected to do the same work, regardless of the credits enrolled in.
Weekly Lectures
All lectures and demos will be conducted online asynchronously. They will be uploaded on Youtube by every Monday and are now part of a playlist on the left called "FA20 Videos"!
Our lectures are broken down into two portions: a concept-based overview of the week's topic, and an implementation-based coding demo. Lectures and demos run for 10 weeks and will be posted as videos on the Cornell AppDev Youtube channel. The textbook chapters also serve as a good resource alongside the lectures.
Weekly Assignments
Programming assignments are due on Sundays at 11:59pm and submitted on CMS (not Piazza!). Late assignments will receive a flat -2 point penalty and no late submissions will be accepted after the Wednesday following the normal submission deadline. We only grant extensions to students who enroll in the course after the first lecture date. Those who are granted extensions must make a private Piazza post and upload their assignments to CMS so that instructors can grade and respond in a timely manner.
Each assignment will have three optional challenges to take your understanding further.
Tier I challenges are designed to be low difficulty, simple extensions of the application (estimated time: <1 hour).
Tier II challenges are medium difficulty extensions that require more forethought for a successful implementation, but are by no means out of reach (estimated time: <2 hours).
Tier III challenges are high difficulty extensions which will often require outside research and will teach you things that we do not have time to cover in this course.
We highly encourage that you reference demos, attend office hours, and ask questions on Piazza. Along with submitting assignment source code, you will be required to submit a text file (README.txt) where you can freely comment on the week’s lecture, assignment, or anything else. You will also fill out a short questionnaire which helps us quantify feedback for improving the course.
Grading
This course is graded as S/U (pass/fail). We want all of our students to pass the course. As long as you turn in every assignment with reasonable effort and follow academic integrity, you should be on pace to pass. All assignments take into account effort with a minimum score if you submit something that shows you tried. No submission or noticeable lack of effort will receive zeros. To pass this course, you will need >= 70 points AND create your own app by participating in the Hack Challenge. We have many extra credit opportunities throughout the semester on assignments (up to 6 points each) as well as user research for apps that Cornell AppDev members are working on. Also note that although not mandatory, lecture attendance is highly recommended.
Item
Weight
PA1 - Reddit
10
PA2 - Venmo (Basic)
10
PA3 - Venmo (Full)
10
PA4 - CMS
10
PA5 - Dockerize CMS
10
PA6 - Deploy CMS
10
Final Project
30
Weekly Surveys
10
Total
100
Passing Score
70
Hack Challenge
All AppDev courses finish with bringing members from iOS, backend, and design together to put what you’ve learned to the test and build your very own application. All students are welcome to submit app ideas and teams up to four will be formed to bring the idea to life. Leading up to the Hack Challenge, the backend course will focus on deployment so that your mobile apps can connect to a live backend running on Google Cloud servers. It goes without saying that the majority of students find the Hack Challenge the most rewarding and fun part of the course!
Due to Spring 2020's move to online instruction, there was no Hack Challenge last semester, so students made individual final projects. We still saw awesome backend projects, so we may make this option available to students again.
Checkout Spring 2020's Final Project Award Winners!
Piazza
We use Piazza for releasing assignments, posting links to lecture videos and transcripts, and answering whatever questions you might have. The Piazza page is linked on the left sidebar titled as Piazza.
Academic Integrity
As with any other course at Cornell, the code of academic integrity will be enforced in this class. While we encourage you to collaborate with other students, all code that you submit must be written by you (and although a great method for learning, pair programming does not abide by our standards of students submitting their own work). We also encourage using the internet to learn more about backend development, but again, any code you submit must be written by you.
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