Although this course was "programming intensive," most of the programming milestones allowed students to define their own "desired needs." However, the programming portions of midterm and final exam, along with programming milestone #6, gave students specific problems for which they had to implement a program solution.

Assignment 2: Design algorithmic solution to different kinds of problems, involving arrays and strings;
Assignment 3: Design algorithmic solutions to problems and determine order of magnitude;
Assignment 4: Apply C operations and operators to a basic equation evaluation problem;
Assignment 5: Introduction to functions in C;
Assignment 6: Build the ctype library;
Assignment 7: File processing and error correction in C;
Assignment 8: Building battleship game and using structs and pointers;
Assignment 9: Build the string library

Required in each lab and each programming assignment.

Given enough time (i.e. outside of class, exam performance was less than satisfactory), students are able to construct a working and reasonably well-designed system (see esp. the final projects, which were quite respectable in most cases, and surprisingly so in a few cases).

Assignment 1: Describe and apply basic UNIX commands;
Assignment 2: Explore the UNIX filesystem;
Assignment 3: Create "Connect Four" game using multiple files and apply "make" to the files;
Assignment 4: Applying and understanding shell metacharacters;
Assignment 5: Apply regular expressions and SED;
Assignment 6: Apply AWK;
Assignment 7: Write a Bourne Shell Program that imitates wc;
Assignment 8: Write a Perl script;
Assignment 9: Write QT program.

A majority of students demonstrated growth in this area as is evidenced by their performance on programming assignment 6. The assignment required a simplified signal processing program to filter and enhance pixel data. The best students were very adept at devising solutions. Average students required some help designing the more difficult functions, particularly regarding matrix data manipulation necessary to filter the data. A few were unable to visualize the problem and construct a functional solution.

In studying influences on computer architecture students learn about the role of evaluation of performance, costs, etc. in creating computing systems.

The development of the SRS including feature descriptions, use cases and models, CRC exercises, DFD and ERD modeling. State Models and Sequence Diagrams.
Architectural models and specification. Design and implementation of the User interface of the project application.
Sampled on the exams

Programming assignment 3, a postscript interpreter, provides the most revealing assessment of this outcome. It requires that students organize program components for reading input, data structures, and recursive computations (and to do it in a language that they have only seen briefly before.) The best students, of course, have no trouble with this, but for most it is a challenge. Almost all students ultimately succeed in getting the interpreter working, but many do not make good use of the available language features (which they have been taught).

The class project is to design and implement a EXT2 file sytem simulator that is completely compatible with the Linux operating system.

Each team delivers a custom software product to its customer who is represented by a mentor for the team.

Students overall performed very well on assignments and exams. The following are quantitative measures for each assignment and exam:

HW 1 - average: 95%;
HW 2 - average 96%;
HW 3 - average: 98%;
HW 4 - average: 92%;
HW 5 - average: 98%;
HW 6 - average: 93%;
HW 7 - average: 85%.
Exam 1 - average: 87%;
Exam 2 - average: 85%;
Final Exam - average: 81%.
Term paper - average: 86%.

Note that the average on exams and homeworks were in the B range or higher.

Each team delivered a software product to their customers. Unfortunately often these products were not well tested, so an unacceptable amount of defects were delivered. This is mostly an artifact of the project being only one semester long and time constraining the amount of testing and is available to students for their project. This has not changed from previous semesters.

Students perform statistical measurements of the performance of the applications that they develop. The class of problems (intractable and NP-complete) to which the covered technology is applicable was discussed.

Students are expected to design and implement several algorithms as homework assignments. In addition, students must complete a semester project which includes the design, implementation, and testing of an AI algorithm.

Teams design their project, prototype it and evaluate the prototype for usability. Course work includes a usability study report.

Final Exam Section E
Final Exam Section A
Final Exam Section B

This ability is required in all projects, where students implement each phase of a compiler. In projects 1, 2, and 3, students did very well mainly because the whole process is focusing on the implementation of what they have been taught. In project 4, however, students were given more choices in making design decisions. They were expected to convert a well-defined representation (an abstract syntax tree) into their own data structure, and then generate an assembly program based on the data structure. The main challenge was to design a low-level representation that can identify building blocks for an assembly program such as function calls and control statements. Only a few students succeeded in devising such data structure while others simply flattened the abstract syntax tree. More guidance on the purpose of having another internal representation is needed.
Project 4, which requires designing internal representation of a computer program. Students are expected to implement data structure to maintain a low-level internal representation to generate assembly codes.

The goal of the course is to design and implement a complete and working operating system by applying the principles and techniques of operating systems. The result is a small system that behaves like the Unix operating system.

Besides what was described above, Homework #1 also required the students to apply what they learned about the different kinds of distributed applications and analyze them in terms of real distributed applications. They averaged 97 out of 105.
Homework #2 required the students to demonstrate mastery of communication and naming in a DS. The students averaged 154 out of 165.
Homework #3 required the students to demonstrate mastery of synchronization, consistency, and replication in a DS. The students averaged 110 out of 140.
Project #1 required programming a simple client-server distributed program, and Project #2 required a programming a more complicated one with multiple clients and multiple servers. The students averaged 99 of 100 and 87 of 100 on these, respectively.
Project #3 involved a complicated distributed system involving event-based programming. The students averaged 87 out of 100.
Exam #1 required the students to review the above. The students achieved satisfactory scores, as noted above.
Exam #2 also required review of the material covered after the midterm. The students averaged 254 out of 373, which is satisfactory given my low curving on exams.

The fifth homework assignment was successfully completed by the students with a 97 % average score. The design problems of laboratory assignments 2, 3 and 4 demonstrated quite well that students can design a process to meet desired needs. The average scores for these assignments were 98 %, 97 % and 95 % respectively. Laboratory experiment 5 was not successfully completed by many students and the average score of this assignment was 75 %. Problems of the first and the final exams were satisfactorily answered by the students where they demonstrated an understanding of the task scheduling concepts as well as the hardware requirements of the bus architecture of the training board they were using.

Homework 2, as well as technical deliverable aspects of projects 1 and 2 were used to assess this outcome. Again, all students met the expectations for this initial offering of the course.