Instructor: Dr. Wayne Summers
Office: SCA207B (phone: 454-3230 or 454-3295)
Office Hours: MWF: 9-9:50 a.m. TR: 4-4:50or by appointment
e-mail: summers_wayne@ColumbusState.edu
homepage: http://csc.ColumbusState.edu/summers

Required Textbook

General Objectives

Specific Objectives

Major Topics

Format and Teaching Style

Assignments for Course

Schedule

Description: The study of algorithms important in software development, providing students with experience in designing and building large programs. An Introduction to Visual Programming.

Prerequisite: Computer Science II - CS250.

Familiarize students with the processes involved in long computer programs;

• Give students practice testing and debugging programs more like the ones they can expect to be working with after graduation;
• Present algorithms and 'tricks' commonly used in the development of computer programs.
• Introduce the concepts of Visual Programming.

Upon completion of this course, students should be more comfortable writing, testing and debugging longer, more sophisticated computer programs on their own. This includes being comfortable with the following:

• top-down design and object-oriented design including the use of tools such as structure charts and step-wise refinement;
• the development of comprehensive test data sets;
• the sophisticated use of procedural and data abstraction including Abstract Data Types and Objects;.
• the storage of modules and objects in libraries and later access of those modules and objects.
• the use of symbolic debuggers.

 * C++ Builder Programming Explorer by Jeff Duntemann, and Jim Miscel, Coriolis Group Books, 1997.

• The Object Concept by Rick Decker & Stuart Hirshfield, PWS Publishing Co, 1995.
• 2 - 3.5 inch double-sided, high density microfloppy disk.
• Software and manuals found in the advanced computing lab.

The course consists of two 50 minute lectures with time included for questions and answers. In addition, there is a 2-hour lab, which will cover material not included in the lectures. Each student will be expected to attend all lectures and lab sessions. The lab is NOT a help session. Students and the instructor will share their experiences of designing, coding, testing and debugging of large programs in general and in the context of specific problems using Visual Programming techniques. Algorithms to accomplish complex behaviors will be developed by the class as a whole and students will be asked to present their design and coding work for class critique. Class participation by all is expected. The emphasis will be on visual programming.

Topics for the course include:

Week 1-4Review of CS II & Object Oriented Programming; C++ Builder

C++ Builder Components

Weeks 5-8Review Fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming

Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism; Type-casting

Forms and Units; Dialogs

Week 9-11Applications

Files & Tables

Simple Database Applications

Weeks 12-15 More Database Applications

Designing and Implementing a Database System

Developing Documentation and Help Screens

Class Attendance: Class attendance is the responsibility of the student, and it is the student's responsibility to independently cover any material s/he may miss. Class attendance and participation may also be used in determining grades. You should attend all lab sessions. Attendance will be taken.

Exams and Assignments: There will be one midterm exam and one comprehensive final exam. Exams cover material from the text as well as laboratory activities. The lectures may not cover all the material in the textbooks. There will be several major programming projects as well as a few small lab assignments. These programs will involve sophisticated algorithms and data structures. The projects will be expected to be complete and robust, including good user interfaces and the ability to handle improper input. Industry level internal and external documentation will also be expected. Late assignments will be subject to up to a 25% deduction in points per day. No credit will be given for assignments that are more than one week late. The following guidelines will be followed when grading programming assignments: execution= 20%, correctness of output= 20%, design of output= 15%, design of logic= 20%, standards= 15%, and documentation= 10%. Programming assignments may be turned in early for extra credit if the assignment is near perfect. (1 point will be given for each day the assignment is turned in early, up to a maximum of 5 points per assignment).

• Small lab assignments= 150-250 pts.
• Programming Project= 100 pts.
• 3 programming assignments = 150-250 pts.
• participation= 50 pts.
• One midterm test = 100 pts.
• 1 Comprehensive FINAL EXAM = 200 pts.

Grades may be determined according to this scale :

A 90% - 100%

B 80% - 89%

C 70% - 79%

D 60% - 69%