The course is set up pretty well, but is very boring. Lots of little assignments, a few bigger assignments that are pretty easy if you're regularly engaging with the lectures, labs, and smaller assignments, and some participation marks. The participation marks were supposed to come from group work during the labs, but for some reason that didn't seem to be working as intended so none of that really happened. There are lots of readings that are supposed to be mandatory, but weren't super necessary for anything other than completing assignments.

The course covers basic ideas of learning psychology and strategies to optimize learning. There were some strategies that I found very helpful, but a lot of the content felt unhelpful and will almost certainly never be useful in the future.

Mariel was very nice, and really tried to make sure people were grasping the content. She wasn't particularly engaging as a lecturer though, unless she was guiding us through an activity. It kind of felt like she was just talking a lot.

Do all the work. All the little bits add up, so not doing a bunch of them really hurts your mark. It's not a particularly difficult class and it's pretty easy to get an A with minimal effort, so there's no reason to neglect the coursework.

The course was originally supposed to include (mostly) weekly labs (weighted in total 20%), five assignments (pass/fail, weighted in total 20%, best three of five counting toward the final mark), and a final exam (weighted 60%, must pass the final to pass the course). This changed partway through the course, so the grade for assignments was just our single best assignment mark. Those assignments felt absolutely brutal. The labs were super easy though, and you could either go to the lab and get the mark from the TA or just submit the lab online. The final exam was absolutely atrocious. It really heavily focused on one specific part of the content and was way more difficult than anything we did in the lectures. It felt a lot like the assignments, which I don't think were a reasonable difficu...read more

The course introduces C++. It's a lot less comprehensive than CSC 111, in the sense that there's no way a prof could possibly cover everything C++ has to offer the way you can in CSC 111 for C. What is covered is sufficient to give you a decent grasp of the language though. Based on what I've heard from working engineers, this course will probably be a useful foundation for skills I will need in the future, so while it hasn't been useful yet I expect it will be.

Teseo was really funny and definitely cares that his students do well, but in practice is a bit of a disaster. His lecture style was pretty similar to Bill Bird's, so the lectures themselves were alright. His organization, however, was near non-existent, to the point that we ended up having one less assignment than we were supposed to and the last two assignments were due on the same day, on the day of the final exam, because Teseo just kind of forgot to give us the first assignments at a point in time that would leave enough time for all of the others. It also took forever to get marks for the first two assignments, despite numerous complaints about the issue. He also kept telling us that he wanted marking to be fair and that he felt bad the final was worth so much, but decided he didn't ...read more

Do all of the assignments, even if they won't all contribute to your final grade. Do all of the lab exercises, even if you don't have to. Do all the lecture examples on your own outside of lecture time. Do literally all the practice you possibly can, because there's just so much stuff and knowing it all well enough that you can do well on a hand-written exam is very, very important.

This course is so much easier than MATH 100 and MATH 101. There's still tons of content to cover, but it doesn't feel as soul-sucking and hopeless. Assignments were very manageable and were good preparation for the two midterms and final exam, which were very reasonable and had questions felt comparable to the weekly tutorial quizzes. The tutorial quizzes were originally written during the tutorial, so those felt super rushed because the TA just didn't really have time to properly go through the practice problems, and also rarely related to the practice problems so I often felt completely unprepared for them. The last few quizzes were submitted online, which definitely made the tutorials be more helpful because we could actually go through the practice problems. We also had a couple AI ass...read more

If you did well in MATH 100 and MATH 101 and have some understanding of basic linear algebra concepts, the content is kind of a piece of cake. There are times where it gets more challenging, but it's often in set-up of the solutions rather than in actually computing the solution, because the methods used to obtain solutions are covered in earlier courses. So if you can do the hard stuff in those courses, you'll do just fine in this one. Personally, I found being familiar with basic vector operations to be absolutely life-saving. Overall, the content has been super useful, and has also made things I've learned in other past courses make so much more sense.

Muhammad was amazing. He was really friendly and very respectful of his students. His explanations were very thorough and so easy to understand, and he always had a great range of examples that covered trickier parts of the material. All of his exams were designed so they were pretty easy if you did all the homework and had a decent understanding of the material. He was very well-organized, and the course Brightspace always had pretty much everything you could possibly need to succeed in the course, from lecture notes (posted within a couple hours of the lecture) to detailed announcements to fantastic videos to replace lectures Muhammad couldn't run in-person. If anyone ever asked me if I would recommend taking a course with Muhammad, I would say yes before they finished asking.

Being familiar with basic linear algebra concepts made the course so much easier, but it also meant I slacked off for slightly too long at the start of the course. The moment things start getting tough, study like crazy, because the course moves fast enough that falling behind is a bit rough to recover from.

I just learned that it used to be 400 level class. Hard projects, get help early and do with friends. Many content will be seen again. in cpe380-480 (memory, cache, etc.)