News and Updates

2025-09-30: Assignment 2 published. Description here. Don't forget to also download the skeleton and dataset. (new)
2025-09-23: Assignment 1 Deadline extended to 29th of Sep.
2025-09-18: Scheduled updated.
2025-09-09: Assignment 1 published. Description here.
2025-08-25: Published course details and schedule.

Important Links and Information:

In this course we will use the following tools:

Questionnaire about programming background: https://www.menti.com/altof21eb82w
- Answer before Sep 1st.
- Please, answer it so that we know the general background of this year's class.
- The quiz is anonymous and not graded, but important for the teaching.
Course schedule in TimeEdit: https://tinyurl.com/dit009h25time
Canvas: Main place where everything course-related is (slides, grades, info). See Modules for a breakdown
Perusall: Read and discuss the course material (“book”) to prepare for lectures.
- Login to Perusall to create an account: https://www.perusall.com/
- Join the Perusall course with code: GOMES-W2GWL
- For student ID: use the username in your GU email. If you haven't received a GU account, wait until you do.
Discord: Used to chat, communicate with teachers, ask questions, discussions, etc. (Not an official channel)
- We recommend that you use your GU student e-mail in Discord.
- Discord Server Link: https://discord.gg/KMSMXKZc4h

Course Grading and Assignments:

The course has two coding assignments and one written exam.
Previous written exams are shared in our Files sections. We will have mini-exam practices throughout the course.
The assignments are made in groups of up to 3, but the grade is individual based on your code contributions.
- You can use the same group in both assignments, or change between.
- Important information about the group work is available here: Group Formation and Rules
- Assignment deadlines will be shared when they are created in Canvas.

Perusall and reading assignments:

You must prepare before every lecture by reading the course material in Perusall. All lectures have quizzes to check your understanding of the reading material. The quiz is not graded, but guides the lecture.
You can get bonus points by engaging with other students in Perusall (details below).
Follow Perusall guidelines (first reading assignment) to understand how to engage meaningfully with the material.

Weekly Lectures and Content:

The course schedule is available in TimeEdit (Link above):
- Important: Check the room as that changes depending on the week!
- If possible, bring your own laptop to lectures and lab sessions. It is helpful to code along with the teacher.
- Supervision sessions (labs) are sessions focused on exercises and practice.
Drop-in office hours: Tuesdays, 09:00 - 10:00
- Francisco’s office: Room 482 - Jupiter building 4th floor
- Drop-in if you have questions about the course, content or just want to chat.

Course Outline and Topics:

Part 1: Basics in Programming
- 2025-09-01: Course Introduction and Printing. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-03: Variables and Types. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-05: Input. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-08: Conditionals. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-10: Loops - For loops. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-12: Loops - While loops. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-15: Functions. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-17: Lists - Part 1. (Francisco)
- 2025-09-19: Recap Lecture (Francisco) (new)
Part 2: Intermediate Programming Concepts
- 2025-09-22: Code Quality and Refactoring. (Ranim)
- 2025-09-24: Dictionaries - Part 1 - Basics. (Ranim)
- 2025-09-26: Dictionaries - Part 2 - Many Dictionaries. (Ranim) (new)
- 2025-09-29: Tuples (new)
- 2025-10-01: Files. (Ranim)
- 2025-10-03: Buffer Session
- 2025-10-06: Parsing: JSON. (Caroline)
- 2025-10-08: Buffer Session
Part 3: Advanced Topics and Final Review
- 2025-10-10: Regex. (Francisco)
- 2025-10-13: Cancelled. (new)
- 2025-10-15: Error handling. (Francisco) (new)
- 2025-10-17: Recursion (Francisco) (new)
- 2025-10-20: Preparation for Exam (new)
- 2025-10-22: Preparation for Exam (new)
- 2025-10-24: Preparation for Exam (new)

Student Representatives:

The student representatives are a point of communication between teachers and the course’s students. They can collect and share feedback about the course's study environment, course activities, workload, etc.

A student representative must attend two meetings with the course examiner to discuss the course. The first meeting is halfway through the course (checkpoint), and the second after the course is finished (retrospective). In addition to that, all students in the course are expected to fill in the course evaluation form sent at the end of the course. The representatives for DIT009 H25 are:

Alex Przygoda - gusprzal@student.gu.se
Arat Behzadi Mohammadi - gusbehzar@student.gu.se
Dominic Wooldridge - guswoodo@student.gu.se
Francisca Obenewaa Ampadu - gusampfr@student.gu.se
Katarzyna Swiatowska - gusswiaka@student.gu.se

Evaluation and Assessment:

The course has 7.5 credits split between: Assignments (3.0 credits) and a Written Exam (4.5 credits). Each component has their own grade that is then combined into your course grade. We use the following grading scale: U (fail), 3 (pass), 4 (pass with merit) and 5 (Pass with distinction). To pass this course, all mandatory components must be passed (i.e., greater or equal to 3). If you fail any of them, see the re-examination section below.

The grades are typically assigned based on points or explicit completion criteria. For points, we use the scale below:

00 - 49 : U
50 - 69 : 3
70 - 84 : 4
85 - 100: 5

Your Assignment Grade is an average of your two assignment grades. In turn, your course grade is a weighted average between your assignment grade and your written exam. Your grade is always rounded to the closest integer value. The detailed calculation is below:

Assignment Grade = (Assignment1 * Assignment2) / 2
Course Grade = (0.4 * Assignment Grade) + (0.6 * Written Exam Grade)

Assignment (3.0 credits):

There are two compulsory coding assignments done in groups. You submit your code as a group, that means that this will be single assignment submission for the entire team. Each assignment is graded based on three criteria:

Functionality: The program follows the specification and produces the expected output.
Code quality: The design choices improve readability and maintainability of the code.
Individual contribution: When working in groups, students are expected to show teamwork, collaboration and unique contributions to the produced code.
- You should specify it based on who worked on each Tasks of the assignment.
- Feel free to divide tasks, but communicate well when integrating your work as a group.
- Simply saying that "All students worked equally on all tasks" is not acceptable. Divide the tasks strategically.
- It is okay to share some of the tasks between team members.

The groups must be decided no later than the corresponding group formation assignment's deadline. See deadlines above.

Written Exam (4.5 credits):

At the end of the course, you will do a written exam. Note that you must register separately for the written exam. The exam covers the entire content of the course. You can find the previous exams and their solutions in Canvas.

For information about written exams visit: https://studentportal.gu.se/english/my-studies/cse/examination

Bonus points: Reading Assignments and Mini-Exams

Bonus points can only be used if you pass the written exam, so the bonus points are helpful to increase your grade to a 4 or a 5. You cannot pass the written exam using bonus points. Bonus points cannot be used in the re-exams.

Mini-Exams (3 bonus points): Throughout the course we will have surprise mini-exams to exercise the current knowledge, as well as simulate the written exam experience. While the main goal of these mini-exams are practice, we want to reward the students that can perform well in those exams. Each exam will award a max of 1 bonus points based on the correctness of the answers of the students.

Reading Assignments (7 bonus points): Reading the preparation materials for lectures is compulsory.

To reward students that engage and contribute to group discussion in Perusall, we award a maximum of 7 bonus points in the written exam to those completing the assignments each week. Each completed assignment gives you 0.5 bonus points, so you need to complete 14 assignments to receive all bonus points.

Your reading assignments are graded in Perusall based on:

The quality of your annotations: Good annotations are those that: show your thought process, or show that you understand the topic by connecting the concepts discussed in the material, or raise questions / answers that help others understand.
Engagement with the material: Time spent reading the assignment and the content read. The best way is to spread your reading in chunks throughout the day and don’t skip any part.
Engagement with others: You should participate in discussion threads by posting your view / agreements / disagreements. This helps you in reflecting on your barriers to understand the topic.

Important: Your annotations are not graded based on whether they are correct. The goal with Perusall is to share your understanding and thought process (independently of being right or wrong). Don’t worry about making mistakes in Perusall. We added a guide in Perusall on how to create meaningful comments.

Research on Teaching of Programming:

We want to understand and improve teaching in Fundamentals of programming.

We strongly believe that your annotations are valuable to help us understand: (i) relevant topics that enhance learning of the fundamentals of programming, (ii) patterns and anti-patterns that support teaching and learning in such courses, and (iii) the impact of peer-instruction in teaching and learning of software engineering.

Therefore, we ask for your consent to allow us to use the Perusall data for our research on teaching and learning of the fundamentals of programming. You can give us your consent by filling out this quiz in Canvas: Consent Form - Perusall Data DIT009 Course (optional)

If you agree to share your data, we will make sure that your data is anonymised and no aspect of your identity will be revealed in our studies. Also, your annotations and your Perusall contributions will not reduce your course grade in any way. There are no penalties in your grade or your learning experience by not joining the studies as well. In case you agree to share your data with us, at any point (during of after the course) you can opt-out of the study. To opt-out after signing in to the study you need to e-mail Francisco and ask to be removed from the Perusall dataset. The bonus points that you received will be kept until the written exam.

In summary, (i) you can receive bonus points regardless of helping us in our research, (ii) your grade is not affected in any way by being a part (or not) of our study, (iii) if you agree to join the study, you can opt-out at any minute, and (iv) your data is completely anonymised and will only be used for research purposes.

If you have any questions or want any clarifications about the usage of your data in our research feel free to contact Francisco and ask about it.

Course Re-examinations:

Each student is granted three examination opportunities within the lecture year. So, you can perform two re-examinations for each component of the course. That means that you have two re-exams of assignments and two re-exams of written exams.

Re-examination of Assignments:

If you fail or do not submit an assignment you have the chance for two re-examinations of that specific assignment. You do re-exam only for those assignments that you failed. If you miss or fail those two re-examination chances then that means that you did complete all assignments for the course. In that case, you must take the course again next year and work on next year's assignments.

The re-examinations are individual. Re-examinations involve (i) fixing the mistakes on your latest submission based on the feedback received, and (ii) making a reflection about the mistakes and how you fixed them.

Re-examination deadlines and submissions are created in Canvas, after the course is finished.

Re-examination of Written exams:

Re-examination of written exams follow the central calendar of re-examinations. The re-exam dates are shared closer to the re-examination periods. Typically, the first re-examination is in early-January and the second re-examination is in August before the next lecture year starts. Contact the student office or check Ladok about important dates.

Tips to prepare for the written re-exam:

Lecture slides begins with a set of questions. Go through each slide and try to answer those questions without looking at the content. After writing down your answers, you can then go through the material (Slides + Perusall + Exercises) to see if you answered them correctly. This should help you find the topics that you are less confident with.
For coding practice, try solving on paper before coding them in the IDE.
Try solving the previous exams. That can help you be familiar with the way of answering the questions (i.e., how to debug and write code without an IDE, and how to structure the content into arguments and justification.

Academic Integrity

Plagiarism or cheating of any kind is not acceptable. Any suspicion or evidence of plagiarism will be investigated and taken to the Disciplinary Committee of the University of Gothenburg. More information here: https://studentportal.gu.se/english/my-studies/pol/cheating-and-plagiarism

Policy on using AI assistance on your Learning

This applied to tools such as ChatGPT, Github Co-pilot and any other tool that can help you in your learning. For simplicity, I will use the term ChatGPT to include all of those types of tools in the two rules below. We will be using Tools to check for plagiarism and usage of Generative AI tools.

Rule #1: Be Honest and Transparent

If you use any code, answer or response from ChatGPT in your assignments, you must tag the code / paragraph that it created and you added to your project.
You must add 1--2 sentences of your own explaining why you think ChatGPT’s suggestion is appropriate for your assignment.
ChatGPT can be used as a tool to improve the quality of written text, such as rephrasing, improving clarity, etc.
- Note: As a general recommendation, try to improve yourself first. Otherwise, you will be too dependent of ChatGPT in your communication.

Rule #2: Be critical in ChatGPT’s suggestions.

If you can’t judge whether its good, you are not ready to use that recommendation / answer. Careful with trust.
ChatGPT has generated a lot of incorrect answers. It was only trained until 2021.
Did you know that the most copied piece of code in StackOverflowLinks had a bug?