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| How to Succeed |
You will learn by doing: Participation in all aspects of this course will be helpful. It is also important for you to allow adequate time for exercises and assignments.
Whenever possible, prepare for lectures: If reading material has been provided ahead of time then you should try to look at this before coming to class. This will make it easier to follow lecture presentations and it will help you to decide what to ask about in class.
You should also attend all lectures: You miss the opportunity to see the instructor’s presentation of course material, to see worked examples, and to ask questions about course material otherwise.
Take the time to work through these at the suggested times. These exercises are designed to help you to learn more about software development with Java by working on your own, at your own pace — by examining, compiling and running a variety of programs, rather than just reading about them. Experiencing something is often far more informative than just reading about it.
Read and work through tutorial exercises before attending the tutorials where these are to be discussed: Try to solve the problems on the exercise. This will give you a chance to try to apply lecture material to solve problems before you are graded for your efforts!
In general there will not be time in tutorials for you to read an exercise for the first time and try to work through it. It will also be more difficult to follow the tutorial presentation if you do not come prepared.
Please use these! Instructors are paid to have office hours for students — and teaching assistants are not.
This term the office hours will be held on Mondays and Fridays from 11:00-12:00 in ICT 612. If the scheduled office hours are at an inconvenient time, then you may contact the instructor to schedule an appointment at a better time instead.
Start to work on these as soon as you can. Remember to allow time to test and debug any programs that you write and to polish your writing on solutions for assignment questions that require written solutions.
Note that you do not have to do everything on your own: Certain kinds of discussions of assignment problems and the use of reference material are permitted and even encouraged, if this helps you to learn. However, you should make sure that you understand the rules about what is allowed in this course before discussing assignment problems with other people or looking for other reference material that might be helpful. Remember, as well, that assignment problems often resemble questions that will appear on later tests, and that you will need to answer these questions by yourself later on — so you will be better prepared for tests if you solve the assignment problems on your own as well.
You certainly can — and should — ask the instructor about assignments during office hours.
Study sooner rather than later. Cramming at the last minute is rarely successful.
Information about each test will be posted on the course web page in time for you to use this to decide how to prepare for it.
Quite a bit of additional material is being provided for this course and is (or will be) described on the course web pages. Please take advantage of this!
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