List of assignments
Assignment schedule
The quarter starts with a set of 7 weekly assignments. Each week's assignment is released after lab each week and due before the next week's lab. These assignments fit together to construct a complete working computer system of your very own – so cool! You will use the final weeks of the quarter to design and complete a final project of your own choosing.
Common questions about assignments
Written by Pat Hanrahan and Julie Zelenski
What is the expected assignment workload?
Students in previous quarters report spending between 10 and 20 hours completing each of the weekly assignments. The assignments build on each other, and it is difficult to recover from skipping an assignment. The last assignment is a final project, and you will have 2-3 weeks to do the project. The final project is more open-ended than the assignments. Most students will spend more than 20 hours on their final project.
What programming environment and tools are used?
Students will use their own laptop for the assignments. If you use a Mac, you will be using the Terminal program and command line tools. If you use Windows, you will install a subsystem running Ubuntu linux to use for your assignments.
When developing,
you will compile programs on your laptop and download them to the Pi.
We use a suite of open-source cross-development tools for arm processors that include gcc , gdb, and binutils.
Other tools such as make and git will also be used.
You will also become versed with the unix shell and using
a unix text editor such as emacs or vi.
Assignments are distributed to students as git repositories.
You edit, compile, and debug programs in the local assignments repository on your laptop. When finished,
you submit by creating a pull-request. Consult Assignment 0 for information about using git.
What is the policy on late assignments?
Assignments will be due weekly Tuesday 5pm. On-time submissions are awarded a small reward that boosts course grade. After the deadline is a 2-day grace period that allows late submission with no penalty. All submissions are expected by end of the grace period. Read our course late policy for specifics.
What is the assignment collaboration policy?
The programming assignments are to be done individually and should represent independent, original work. We adhere to the Stanford and CS department Honor Code policies, and offer specific examples of its application to CS107E coursework in our course collaboration policy.
The final project is usually done in teams of 2, and sometimes 3. All team members are expected to contribute equally to the effort.
How are assignments structured?
Each assignment writeup has a required basic part and various optional extensions.
The core features are required of all students. The work follows directly from the material covered in lecture and lab. It has a tight specification to which your submission is expected to match. We provide suggested steps to guide you through completing the core part.
The extensions are optional add-ons that allow you to go deeper, implement extended features, and apply your creativity. These extended features earn bonus credits. Extensions are not required but everyone is highly encouraged to attempt some of these explorations. The extensions are given with a looser specification and much less guidance than the core features. If tackling an extension, you will need to research advanced material on your own and apply your creativity in problem-solving.
In assignments 2 through 7, you will build up a library of useful utilities for bare metal programming on the Pi. These assignments build on one another. To complete assignment 5, say, you will need working versions of assignments 2 through 4.
If you do not complete the core part of an assignment, you may have trouble completing the next assignment. To help you in these situations, we provide our compiled reference implementations. If your code doesn't work, you can fall back on our version.
The last assignment requires you to use code from many of the previous assignments. To encourage you to complete all assignments and resubmit to fix your bugs, if you submit the last assignment using only your own code, we award you additional bonus credits for building a complete working system.
How are assignments graded? What kind of feedback will I get on my work?
We evaluate your assignments through these lenses:
- Functionality (does it pass the QA tests?)
- Quality/style (does my code achieve my team/tech lead's standards?)
- Timeliness (did I meet the program manager's schedule?)
We test functionality by running a set of automated and manual grading tests. If we find a test failure, we post a GitHub issue for the problem. An issue is categorized with its priority, Priority 1 being the most important and decreasing from there. The option to revise and resubmit is available for all GitHub issues, with special emphasis on fixing those of higher priority.
- P1: "Essential" tests exercise core functionality that is critical to the system's operation. Your system won't be fully usable until these high priority issues are addressed.
- P2: "Comprehensive" tests thoroughly exercise the full range of functionality including lesser-traveled features.
- P3: "Just Mention" are used for small concerns as a misbehavior in an obscure edge case or minor issue of polish.
We want to help you learn how to write high-quality code that will be eagerly welcomed into your team's repository– code that it is not only functionally correct, but also thoughtfully designed and written to be readable and maintainable. Whether you have a strong established sense of style or are still finding your way, we hope all of you aspire to level up the quality of your code this quarter and we are eager to support you on this journey! Each assignment has a companion "style reflection"; this guided activity is for you to review your code and its design choices and build awareness of how you can continue to improve. We have lots of experience reading, writing, and reviewing code and would love to help you further develop and refine your "coding voice".
Managing your time so as to make a solid submission on schedule is a valuable skill to cultivate; we encourage and support your achievements in timeliness by rewarding your on-time submissions as well as timely followup to resolve any outstanding issues.
For information on course grades, see our course grading policy.
What is the revise and resubmit policy?
Many of the assignments in this course build upon each other. It is a good idea, both for your learning and your grade, to revise and resubmit previous work after seeing which tests they fail.
For a failed test case on core functionality, we will file a GitHub issue to report the bug. You are encouraged to review your issues and rework your code to fix the underlying bug(s). When you submit the revised code, we will run the tests again and close issues for those test cases that are now passing.
The final opportunity for revise and resubmit will be with your submission for Assignment 7. Pro tip: rather than put off working on bug fixes til the very end, better to work on them as time allows. Early resolution is a boost for your timeliness and avoids you facing a big backlog to work through under time crunch – win-win!