COSC480-25S1 (D) Semester One 2025 (Distance)

Computer Programming

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 17 February 2025
End Date: Sunday, 22 June 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 2 March 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 11 May 2025

Description

An introduction for graduate students to imperative computer programming using Python. Topics include: expressions, assignment, selection and iteration, structured data (lists, dictionaries, tuples, arrays), functional decomposition, file processing, using library code, and an introduction to object-oriented programming. Students must develop a significant piece of program code in a project that demonstrates mastery of programming for practical applications, typically in data science.

This is an accelerated course aimed at graduate students without any prior programming background. It introduces the concepts of imperative programming, using Python, to develop programming skills aimed at data science-centred problems.  

Learners will develop their skills throughout the course through a project that involves data cleansing, data analysis and visualisation. Topics covered throughout the course to support the completion of this project include:
• Expressions
• Assignment
• Selection and iteration
• Structured data (lists, dictionaries, tuples, arrays)
• Functional decomposition
• Object-oriented programming
• Data manipulation using Pandas
• Visualisation with matplotlib

Learning Outcomes

  • Fluently solve simple programming problems with a given programming language.
  • Analyse programming code to predict program behaviour.    
  • Employ appropriate third-party programming libraries to deal with complex programming problems.    
  • Develop a program to cleanse data, including organising, identify trends and visualise data for ill-specified, complex data-science problems.

Prerequisites

Subject to approval of the Head of Department.

Course Coordinator

Chenyi Zhang

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage  Description
Project part 1 5% Project part 1 - Read me
Project part 2 20% Project part 2 - Mini project
Project part 3 35% Project part 3 - Final project
GIT Portfolio 10%
Quizzes 25%
Forum activity 5%

Notes

There are several important documents available online about departmental regulations, policies and guidelines at the following site. We expect all students to be familiar with these.

Notices about this class will be posted to the class forum in the Learn system.

COSC students will also be made members of a class called “CSSE Notices”, where general notices will be posted that apply to all classes (such as information about building access or job opportunities).

Additional Course Outline Information

Academic integrity

All work completed as part of COSC480 must be:

• Substantially your own work; and;
• the work of others – including generative AI – is cited correctly to acknowledge use of external materials.

Grade moderation

To gain a passing grade in COSC480 students must:

1. achieve an average grade of at least 50% over all assessment items
2. achieve a passing grade in each of the two oral exams delivered*

Upon satisfying the above criteria your grades will be determined by University-wide grade scale . However, if you do not satisfy both passing criteria you will be given either a D or E grade depending on marks.

* If a student fails 2. above, they must pass a invigilated python proficiency exam.

Delivery

This course is 100% online, which means you can log on when it suits you each week to fit learning into your life, so long as you meet the assessment deadlines.

You will also be supported by the course tutor, who will provide advice as you develop your project.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $1,176.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Computer Science and Software Engineering .

All COSC480 Occurrences