For the final group project, your team must consist of people from the same recitation as yourself. Since you will not be permitted to change recitations after they are assigned, take care when choosing the people you would like to be with in a recitation. The list of people you wish to work with should be consistent amongst yourselves.
| Lecturer | Srini Devadas | NE43-258 | devadas at MIT |
| Course Secretary | Sally Lee | NE43-209 | sally-at-no.lcs.mit.edu |
| Head TA | Matt Notowidigdo | NE43-246 | noto at MIT |
| TAs | Roger Moh | NE43-526 | chmoh at MIT |
| Thomer Gil | NE43-530 | 6.170@thomer.com | |
| Sameer Ajmani | NE43-526 | ajmani at MIT | |
| David Saff | NE43-525 | saff at MIT | |
| Lee Lin | NE43-525 | leelin at MIT | |
| Brian Dunagan | NE43-V640 | bdunagan at MIT | |
| LAs | Corey McCaffrey | coreymcc at MIT | |
| Ragu Vijaykumar | ragu at MIT | ||
| Fen Zhao | fenzhao at MIT | ||
| David Huang | huang at MIT | ||
| Ning Song | nsong at MIT | ||
| Baris Yuksel | barisy at MIT | ||
| Paul Soto | psoto at MIT | ||
| Sisi Liu | sisi at MIT | ||
| Bosun J Adeoti | jabos at MIT | ||
| Nidhi Sharma | nidhi at MIT |
Mail sent to 6.170-staff@mit.edu
will reach the lecturer, TAs, and LAs.
Mail sent to 6.170-lecturers@mit.edu
will reach the lecturer.
Mail sent to 6.170-tas@mit.edu
will reach the teaching assistants.
Mail sent to 6.170-las@mit.edu
will reach the laboratory assistants.
TAs will schedule office hours and locations by the end of the first week of class. Please visit your TA (or another TA, if necessary) during their office hours if you have anything you'd like to discuss about the course or course materials. Please see the TA Office Hours for the locations and times of office hours.
LAs will schedule LA hours held in designated clusters. Please feel free to work in the cluster so you can talk to them in person when you have questions about Java or other technical details. Time permitting, they also monitor the 6.170 zephyr instance while on duty, but they give priority to students who visit them in person. Please see the LA Lab hours for an up-to-date list of hours.
The lecturer is available by appointment but does not have fixed office hours.
When solving your assignments, the laboratory assistants should be your first resource for problems with your Java code or the Athena environment. For other questions, the LAs may be able to help you with advice or information, but the answer of a TA or lecturer is authoritative. Your TA can answer most questions about the course. The LAs or TAs may choose to escalate your questions to the head TA or the lecturer; you may also do so yourself if you do not receive an answer.
Here are some examples of questions appropriate for various staff members. Naturally, you shouldn't ask a question unless you have first tried to find the answer yourself. When asking a question, be sure to say what you have already tried to do to solve the problem; that way the staff won't waste its time and yours repeating something you already know.
6.170 meets Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 2-3PM in the afternoon. Generally speaking, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are lectures in 34-101, and Thursday is recitation. We will, however, have a lecture in 34-101 on Thursday, September 4. Your first recitation will be Thursday, September 11.
Recitation Section Locations (Thursdays at 2pm):| Section | Instructor | Location |
| 1 | Matt Notowidigdo | 34-302 |
| 2 | Lee Lin | 36-372 |
| 3 | David Saff | 24-115 |
| 4 | Brian Dunagan | 26-168 |
| 5 | Thomer Gil | 4-257 |
| 6 | Sameer Ajmani | 26-210 |
| 7 | Roger Moh | 26-322 |
While 6.170 is a lab class, lab work will be performed on your own time either on Athena or using your own personal machine. Since both lectures and recitations in 6.170 tend to focus on conceptual material pertaining to software engineering rather than particulars of how to use the Java language, this term we are offering optional tutoring sessions in lab during the first two weeks of the term. These sessions are optional and ungraded, but they will help you to understand and use the Java language and tools more effectively.
Lab sessions will involve a one-hour exercise that introduces you to some tool (such as editing environments, compilers, debuggers, and profilers) or to some aspect of the Java language (such as inheritance and the Swing library). TAs and LAs will be on hand to help you.
Lab sessions are held in 34-501 (the 6.001 lab) from 11am-5pm.
There will be two one-hour quizzes during class time; see the class schedule.
| Individual Work | Problem set 1 | 6% | |
| Problem set 2 | 6% | ||
| Problem set 3 | 6% | ||
| Problem set 4 | 9% | ||
| Problem set 5 | 9% | ||
| Problem set 6 | 9% | ||
| Quiz 1 | 12.5% | ||
| Quiz 2 | 12.5% | ||
| Group Work |
|
Final Project | 30% |
We will make every effort to standardize TA grading policies, but we reserve the right to normalize grades across recitation sections to account for remaining disparities.
All team members in a project team will receive the same project grade. In order to have the best project experience, team up with students who have the same expectations and motivations as you do with respect to project and overall course grades.
It is our intention that each student gains the full benefit of 6.170 and achieves a full understanding of the course material. However, we recognize that some students benefit from discussions with other students. Therefore, we permit limited collaboration on 6.170 assignments.
No one (except the 6.170 staff) may ever view your solutions; this includes your writing, code, tests, documentation, etc. It is a violation of the collaboration policy to zephyr more than 5 lines of code to the zephyr instance. (You are better off talking to an LA in person anyway.) It is a violation of the collaboration policy to permit anyone besides the 6.170 staff and yourself read-access to your ~/6.170 directory or any other location where you keep 6.170 code. (If you need to copy code to your home computer, use scp rather than putting it in your ~/www/ directory.)
For example, it is permissable to discuss testing strategies with another student (assuming you follow the guidlines for discussion given above), but you may not view another student's testing code.
You may not view anyone else's solutions (from this semester or previous semesters). You may not refer to code or specifications in materials from previous offerings of 6.170 ("bibles"), nor to materials on the Internet that solves the problems.
Your solutions may use code from the standard Java libraries and from libraries offered for your use by the 6.170 staff. All other code in your submitted work for the individual assignments must be of your own creation.
You may use conceptual material that you obtain from textbooks, the Internet, previous offerings of 6.170, and other sources. For instance, Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein is an excellent resource for looking up algorithms. If you use any material from an external source, you must credit it clearly in your documentation.
Students in 6.170 are required to submit the implementation part of the problem sets electronically.
Your documentation must clearly indicate any shortcomings of your program. If your code does not compile, or if certain functionality is missing, and your documentation does not clearly and prominently indicate as such, then you will lose points for the omissions (as well as for the defect itself).Diagrams which you turn in must be readable. While we will not be grading on artistic merit, if it is not easy to see what is happening, then you have not successfully conveyed the relevant information, and you will be graded accordingly.
Electronic problem set solutions should be submitted via the turnin6170 script. You should place your name near the top of all files you turnin. Along with your electronic submissions you must always include a README file which should provide a brief overview of your turnin. The README should include brief descriptions of any files you turn in. (You may wish to describe each by a single line, or describe groups of them together; do whatever is clearest.) Do not turn in extraneous files, as every file you turn in will be graded, and points will be taken off for files that are not used or are not mentioned in the README file.
All code you turn in must compile. It must also run when called in the manner specified by the problem set, or it will not receive credit for correctness. TAs will not adjust your output formats or otherwise debug your programs to try to get them to run. You will be given example input and output files, and often full test suites as well, in order to test your own programs before submitting them. Specifically, you should use the validate6170 script to check your code before you submit it.
For many of the problem sets we will provide you with a detailed specification for the behavior of the code that you will write. It is imperative that the program you write conform precisely to these specifications. This means that your program should not write anything to either standard out or standard error other than precisely what is specified. You should verify that the spelling, phrasing, or punctuation conforms to the specification as your program will be subjected to automated testing. The output of your program should furthermore be deterministic: it should not vary from run to run when presented with the same input.
In addition to providing specifications for the behavior of your program, we will often provide specifications for certain classes. For such classes you are free to add private fields, methods, and constructors, but unless otherwise specified you may not add public, protected, or default-access (package) fields, methods, or constructors.
The test suites which you include with your program should run in under a minute when testing your implementation.