Course Syllabus

• Course Schedule
• Syllabus
• Assignments

Course Description

Welcome to INFO 201 A, Technical Foundations of Informatics! This course introduces fundamental tools and technologies necessary to transform raw data into information. In doing so, you'll learn how to write code to work with data. We'll cover skills associated with each component of the information lifecycle, including the collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of data. Core competencies underlying this process, including data wrangling, version control, and command line proficiency, are acquired through real-world data-driven challenges.­­­ After finishing this course, you'll be ready to apply these data-skills to your field of interest, or pursue higher level informatics courses.

Required Course Materials

This course relies heavily on the book Programming Skills for Data Science, which you can access online (for free) using your UW Net ID via SafariBooksOnline (Links to an external site.).

The books is also available in print, which you can order through InformIT (Links to an external site.), Pearson (Links to an external site.), Amazon (Links to an external site.), or at a local bookstore (Links to an external site.).

Student Outcomes/Learning Goals

In this course, you will learn how to write code to read, wrangle, analyze, visualize, and communicate data. Through this course, you'll learn to:

• Provide instructions to your computer using the command line
• Create well-formatted code documentation using the Markdown syntax
• Understand the foundations of the R programming language
• Load, transform, reshape, and compute summary information on a variety of data structures
• Design and programmatically build insightful data visualizations
• Built interactive web applications to explore data and insights (from the R language)

Assignments

Because of the ever-changing nature of open source software, the purpose of this course is for you to learn how to teach yourself new tools (rather than learn a pre-defined set of skills). To accomplish this, you are expected to complete a series of weekly challenges that assess their progress throughout the course. We'll work with real-world data in this course, and you will be expected to use your programming skills to answer questions using those datasets.

As the course progresses, you will have an increasing amount of flexibility with the challenges. At the end of the course, you will complete a group project in which they take a deep dive into a dataset of their choice.

Grading

This course uses the iSchool Standard Grading Scheme, which converts percentage grades into 4.0 grades.

Late Submissions

You earn points by completing assignments thoroughly and on time. The maximum number of points that you can earn on any assignment will decrease by 10% each 24 hour period after the deadline. After 5 days, students may receive up to 50% credit on a late submission until the last day of class.

However, we provide flexibility in the following forms:

• Individual Assignments: Each student has four late days to wave this penalty at their discretion. Late days cannot be used on the final project, and cannot be exchanged for assignment points. To use a late day, you must make a comment on Canvas at the time of submission indicating the number of late days you would like to use
• Reading Quizzes: Your lowest reading quiz score will be automatically dropped.
• Group Project: There is no flexibility in the submission deadlines for any the group project assignments. They will automatically have 10% deducted for each 24 hour period they are submitted late.
• Extenuating Circumstances and Personal Emergencies: If you have (anticipated) circumstances that warrant an additional extension (e.g. school related travel), you must request an extension at least one week in advance. If you experience a personal emergency (e.g., physical/mental health, family emergency, etc.), please reach out to us when possible and we will make the appropriate accommodations.

Grading Clarifications

Resources

Student Resources
A number of challenges from a variety of directions can affect your ability to bring your optimal attention and energy to a course. Student Resources is a set of links to campus resources that UW makes available to students in trying to mitigate and cope with some of these challenges.

iSchool Technology Requirements
The iSchool has a set of technology requirements for both online and residential students. We highly recommend that students adhere to these standards which are updated annually. Students who do not meet these standards may experience technology problems throughout the course.

iSchool Learning Technologies Support Site
Knowledge base for Canvas, VoiceThread, web conferencing systems, and other learning technologies tools.

UW Libraries
In this course you may be required to access a large number of databases through the Internet. Several of these databases are publicly available, but some are proprietary and access requires authentication through the UW Libraries. Information about logging in to use these databases is available on the Connecting to the Libraries page.

Academic Conduct

Please review the iSchool Academic Policies which cover:

• Academic and Behavioral Misconduct
• Academic Integrity
• Copyright
• Privacy
• Concerns About a Course
• Evaluation of Student Work

In this course, we want to achieve a collaborative and supportive environment, but have very strict limitations around that type of collaboration. The following represent permissible (and encouraged!) forms of collaboration:

• Asking a friend to explain a general concept or problem solving approach
• Posting an error message to the slack channel to ask for help
• Asking people to share publicly available resources that help solve a problem
• Sharing your code with your TA or instructor to ask for more involved help

However, the following are explicitly not permitted:

• Your individual assignment code may never appear on another person's computer (in any format). This includes opening the code in a browser, sending a screenshot, etc.
• You must never submit assignemnt code that someone else wrote (including other students, or someone on the web).
• If your individual assignment code is based on a tutorial or other resource that you find online, you must provide a reference to that resource (a URL is fine)
• You must not publish your individual assignment code (because the code may be used in a future or concurrent course).

If there is any suspicion of plagiarism (code sharing, copying code from the internet without attribution, or other forms), there will be notable consequences both within the context of this course and in the University at large. At a minimum, students will receive a zero on an assignment, however there may be larger consequences depending on the situation. If you have any questions about the appropriateness of using open source code or working together, don't hesitate to ask.