Goals, expectations and grading

The goal of this course is to teach core programming skills quickly, using a beginner-friendly but powerful high level programming language (Python), then to use those skills  to examine a series of programming and application design areas that are important in medical informatics. Students participating in this course will learn to write limited  programs for personal use or research, will be able to discuss application design with programmers and system managers, and will gain skills with a tool that can grow with  them in the future.

Students' responsibilities

Students should attend the Thursday 9am-12noon didactic/lab sessions, participate actively in the class discussions and complete the assigned readings (see ClassSchedule). They should complete and upload homework problem assignments on time (see below) and make sure that they understand the material in the readings and assignments. Students should also participate actively in the online class discussion (see DiscussionPage and individual session pages), including posting questions and responding to others' questions. Students are responsible for letting the instructors know if there are areas of confusion and should persist in asking questions until the issues are resolved. Finally students should choose a topic and begin work on the independent programming project (see ClassSchedule) during the second half of the term and should make sure that the project is turned in on time.

Homework

Programming problems will be assigned in each session to be done as homework. Students should do their homework individually and submit their programs by email as attached .py files to the teaching assistant (Matthew Scotch) by midnight Tuesday each week. Students should also be prepared to present and discuss their homework programs in the first part of each class period. Homework will be graded (see below) and returned to the student within several days.

Grading

Half of the grade will be based on the homework problem assignments (assignments should show adequate effort and progress), one fourth on the independent programming project (quality of work), and one fourth on class and online discussion participation. With respect to the latter, all students should plan to post questions and comments regularly to the online discussion; the number and quality of these postings will affect the grade.