FALL 2024

Teaching

To fulfill its mission, AC-DC carries out challenging human studies, which accrue big data, requiring sophisticated analysis. The skills required for such studies is a superset of the skills required for any other data-driven project.

KEY INFORMATION

Instructors

Grading

Prof. Ioannis Pavlidis (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Office Hours: Thu 3-4 pm @ TEAMS
Fettah Kiran (fkiran[@]uh.edu) Office Hours: Mon 12-01 pm @ TEAMS
Mert Saritac (mesaritac[@]uh.edu) Office Hours: Wed 12-01 pm @ TEAMS

Grading

7% Quizzes
14% Weekly app assignments
45% (3 x 15%) In-class app development exams
34% Semester-long app project

Grade-Thresholds: A >= 93, A- >= 90, B+ >= 85, B >= 80, B- >= 75, C+ >= 70, C >= 65, F < 65

Semester-Long App Project

The project can be done either individually or in pairs. Pairs need to be declared by the end of the second week of classes.

App Specification: 20% of the total project grade
- 10% description, 30% user flow, 20% wireframes, 20% mockups, 20% prototype
Beta App: 30% of the total project grade
- 50% robust functionality, 30% user interface, 20% coding excellence
Production App: 50% of the total project grade
- 50% robust functionality, 30% user interface, 20% coding excellence

Day, Time and Room

Thursday, 4:00-7:00 pm @ 315-HBS1 and @ TEAMS

Required Software

Mac OS - 14.6.1 and higher
XCode - 15.4.0 and higher

Class Resources

Github

COURSE OUTLINE

WEEKLY GRADES AND STUDENT COMMENTS

Week 10 - October 24, 2024

Comments from students

It was a good day.

good

Great project presentations.

Received good comments from professor and TA about the Beta app and changes needed for final app.

good

Comments and suggestions from professor allowed me to understand what should be changed within our App.

Week 9 - October 17, 2024

Comments from students

exam was doable in given time.

Week 8 - October 10, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Not really a comment about the class, rather an inquiry. Would it be possible to get more than 7 points back for fixing the design of our project app? Perhaps 50% if the proper changes are made?

Week 7 - October 03, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Hi, I think it would have been nice if we were able to do presentations for our app specification / mockup / prototype before it was due so that we can receive feedback and improve upon it before then. It would also be cool if we have the opportunity to revise and resubmit our app specification based on the given feedback to ensure we are on the right track. Thanks.

Week 6 - September 26, 2024

Comments from students

Seeing other students' apps was neat. Definitely gives inspiration and things to fix with my own app.

N/A

good!

Everything seemed good, no complaints

No Comment.

Good

Week 5 - September 19, 2024

Comments from students

Exam was very time consuming, should suggest to have 1 or 2 less feature like ipad view.

The iPad portion was difficult. I had trouble making the views work dynamically with the different type of IOS devices. If possible, can we go over in class how to make our apps dynamic so that they work on different types of IOS devices especially how to size the objects on the screen so that they grow or shrink dynamically with the size of the screen.

Creating the functionality and design was not so difficult and was actually a really good benchmark for what we learned so far. On the other hand, 3 hours was not enough time to complete the exam comfortably. Although I finished, it felt extremely rushed and even had reluctance towards building my app in order to save time since I only have 8gb RAM on my Macbook. That being said, the lectures prepare us well for assignments and the exam, but the exam was too fast paced making it unlikely to perform well.

Everything that was covered in class was rather straightforward, but I noticed some UI errors in the exam description and didn't include them in my final exam submission (Images overlapping other UI elements in unintentional ways). I also do not believe that the IPad formatting should be apart of our grading due to 2 main issues: 1. None of our Homeworks so far have specifically asked us to format an app to the IPad 2. MacInCloud users might have run into a similar issue as me during the exam where I waited 15+ minutes and the preview for the Ipad would not come up. On top of that, trying to build and test the app in the simulator takes entirely too long for an Exam environment (for MacInCloud), so that was not an option for me unfortunately.

3hrs is not enough

Please remove or reduce point for iPad Adjustment. I don't remember if we covered it in class. And to be honest, I have no idea how to it in Exam 1.

Exam was very time consuming, should suggest to have 1 or 2 less feature like ipad view.

Was a bit too large - despite the 3h we were given, I wasn't able to finish the functionality. My Xcode was also acting up during the first hour (freezing up), compounding the issue.

The homework 4 was really interesting and I enjoyed doing it. I learned a lot of things. Regarding the exam it was easier than the last year's exam, but the iPad section was the twist. I wasn't able to do the iPad section, and I feel bad about it.

I honestly misread the actual exam and thought the star to be like a button but when I realized it had another logic it was hard to go back. Also the design part was easy but I felt like using navigation stack was pretty new to me since we hadn't done in the class. However now I can prepare on how in class exam would be like and what level to expect the design and logic side of the app.

I think when talking about the exam, the tasks/functionalities themselves were not too difficult. It was a fair exam given the past homework assignments that have been given to us, but time definitely passed by way faster than I thought it would. I think many students can agree that they were still working on some implementation by the time we had roughly 5 minutes or so left for the exam. This gives me a better idea on what to review to not waste time on small things in the future. Overall though, was a fair exam that tested us on what we've been working on these last weeks. The sample exam given was more difficult than this, so it was a good way to prepare.

Week 4 - September 12, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
One thing I'd like to request is when a student asks a question in the in-person class, could you repeat the question for the online section? Thanks!

Week 3 - September 5, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I think a little more detail and direction on how to do certain parts of the HW would be better if it was provided in the HW file. For example for the last assignment the scroll view was not understandable if one of the images did not have a cut off. I think that this could cause to loose points without noticing. It would also be great to see how many points each task in the HW is worth. Thank you.

Week 2 - August 29, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall, it was a good class. I personally felt a little panicky in the beginning trying to keep up with the initial cards app, mainly due to my own lack of preparedness. I didn't have any of the assets downloaded ahead of time and this combined with trying to keep up with the live demo in Teams, my MacIntoPC cloud window, and then the windows within xCode itself, all on one physical laptop screen made following along difficult, but I got into the hang of it and kept up. Will definitely be using a second monitor from here on though. Lastly, I felt some parts of the quiz were really out there questions (particularly one relating to an error) that I feel we were ill-prepared for, as after reading mounds of Swift documentation, practicing app development using UIKit, I felt that error was rather unrelated to anything of substance that we were taught in class or expected to review. (I would have more likely expected a question about error handling to be about guard statement to protect from nil errors/handling optionals etc). Next week's reading is less broad I feel so I don't think this will be as much of an issue.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Could you kindly clarify where the class materials are being posted? It can be disruptive when materials are scattered across multiple locations, such as GitHub or Teams. Additionally, it becomes challenging to locate materials when files or folders have similar names, especially when new applications are created locally alongside the zip files in Teams and the git directory.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Overall the lecture was very useful and pretty well explained, but many of us are learning swiftUI for the first time, if we could go a bit slower during hands on,(4:00 PM - 5:30PM) it will be really helpful. The last part of the last session where we added the "select season" button was not explained because of time limit. Revisiting that will be really helpful.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Is there any useful websites to test our practical skills that you would recommend?

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
For the lecture part of class, could you maybe go a little slower when building the app? I feel like if I slow down for a second I've already fallen behind and struggle to catch up. Thanks!

Week 1 - August 22, 2024

Comments from students

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
pretty good

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
No comment

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I would recommend that perhaps we get maybe a clear guideline of the things we need to know and review, as of course the provided reading for this week is large and lot of content to cover regarding UIKit and Swift. Maybe a small overview at the end of reading saying "Goal for this week's reading is: You should have an understanding of basic Swift syntax etc".

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
No comments at the moment.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It was good