Guideline to Lab Reports and Assignments

General Info about Lab Reports and Grading

What to hand in

The assignments will clearly state wether you need to hand in a LabReport as PDF, source code or both.

• if both PDF and source code have to be submitted, upload two files: a PDF and a zip with the source code. Please do not include the PDF in the ZIP file.

• If only a PDF has to be submitted, hand in the PDF. If only source code has to be submitted, hand in only the zip file.

• As for the zipped source code, it’s basically as simple as zipping together the sources you’ve downloaded from github and uploading that File.

• Submit your complete work on time. There is no point in emailing me if you didn’t. Everybody has a cold now and then, but if you miss just one week (and your group wasn’t able to upload it for you…) you still have the chance of getting enough points for a 1.0 as there is enough slack in the grading. If you become seriously ill and miss more than one week, make sure you collect medical certificates (ärztliche Atteste) immediately and email me/talk to me asap and we will find a solution.

• Submissions not adhering to these guidelines will not be graded.

More about the Lab Report in PDF

• Include the names of all people in the group at the top of the PDF.

• I will assign 0 points to all work handed in by more than one group/person without stating the names of the others. That is, if you work on an exercise together with others, or help them with it, make sure all of you make that “collaboration” clear in their reports, and do so yourself in your report, otherwise you might receive 0 points as well.

More about the Zipped Sources

• please don’t rename subdirectories without reason. One reason might be:
• if you copy a project because you wan’t to try out variations, please decide if you wan’t me to review them or not. If not, don’t include them. If I should review them, please provide an overview in the report what I find where (or, simply: solution in clock-display, we tried this and that which didn’t work, see line n in clock-display-misterious). Why? because for me (and for yourself 2 months from now) a report stating “all worked” together with a collection of three variants of a solution without a note on which one was which makes it hard to figure out why there are three variants and which one was the working solution.
• ZIP is a compression format among many. Be sure that you actually zip the files and don’t use another compression algorithm. One easy way to tell is by the extension of the file your tool creates - it should be .zip - see zip archive format.
• Only zip your sources once. Do not include zips in your zip file. (Why?)

Collaborating with Peers

I strongly encourage working on the exercises in pairs or small groups up to three people. You have to find out what works best for you. I also encourage getting help from other people, be it other groups in your semester or the Lernzentrum Informatik (discontinued) if you get stuck with the exercises. And I also encourage helping other people - it’s a great way to learn and deepen the understanding of a subject.

Depending on the class and exercises you may also turn in group work, and especially in the first semester but also in other classes I like to draw groups by lot to give you the opportunity to work with different people and get to know more people in your semester.

Language

You can use both German and English in your reports, as long as you don’t switch languages within one sentence and do your best to adhere to the grammar and spelling rules of the respective language.

Star Gradings for Exercises

• where applicable -