Peter Chapin. Office: WIL-414 on the Williston campus. Phone: (802) 879-5974 (voice mail active). Email: peter.chapin@vermontstate.edu. I will usually respond to email within one business day. Email is the best way to contact me. I am also sometimes on the Libera.Chat IRC network under the nickname pcc. Some VTSU students maintain a Discord server for SE/IT classes at Vermont State University. I can usually be found there as pchapin. Use this link to join that system: https://discord.gg/rgk3vDbZwE.
The official course outline lists high-level course objectives and content.
The high-level goal of this course is to give you experience working on a software project using a technology that might be new to you. The instructor chooses the project and the technology that supports it. Each student will work on their own version of the same project. At the end of the course, each student will do a short presentation on their work.
This (Spring 2025) edition of the course will focus on Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies. During the first few weeks of the course, you will learn about the technologies needed for the project. During the last part of the course, you will work on the project itself.
This course requires that you have completed either CIS-2025, CIS-2262, or CIS-2271 as a prerequisite. I will assume you are familiar with basic programming concepts. The program we will be doing in this course will be in Python, which you might not have seen yet. However, you will likely find Python relatively easy to learn.
The single board computer we will be using in the project is a BeaglePlay running Debian Linux. No familiarity with single board computers or Linux is assumed.
There is no textbook that you have to buy for this course. Instead, we will make use of some books in the O'Reilly eBook collection available via the VSCS Libraries.
I have created an email distribution list for the class. I will use this list to distribute announcements and other supplementary materials. Be sure to check your mail regularly (daily) or you might miss something important. If you send a question in email directly to me, I may reply to my distribution list if I think that others would benefit from my answer. If you would rather I did not reply to the list, you should say so in your message.
My home page contains various documents of general interest.
I grade on a point system. Each assignment is worth a certain number of points. At the end of the semester, I total all the points you earned and compare that to the total number of possible points. In this course, there are two components to your grade.
Lab Reports (20 pts/each). There will be about ten lab reports during the semester for a total of approximately 200 points.
Final Presentation (20 pts). THere will be a final presentation where you will talk about what you did on your project.
For the lab, you can discuss the material with other students and post questions related to the assignments in on-line forums. However, you should still do your own work. See the section on "Copying Policy" below for more information.
I will not formally take attendance, but I will notice people who seem "disengaged" in the class. Although attendance is not specifically part of my grading policy, it will, like other intangible items such as "professionalism," play a role in how likely I am to round up borderline grades.
Roughly, late submissions are not accepted. If something comes up that prevents you from handing in an assignment on time, contact me, before the deadline if at all possible, to discuss your issue. As a practical matter I can accept a late submission if I have neither distributed a solution nor graded the assignment. Since either of those things can happen at any time after the due date, you should plan on submitting all materials on time.
I encourage you to share ideas with your fellow students, so I won't be shocked to learn that you've been talking with someone about an assignment. In fact, if you worked closely with someone else, you should make a note on your submission that mentions the names of your associates.
However, I do ask you to do your own work in your final submissions. If two submissions exhibit what I feel to be "excessive similarity" I will grade the submissions based on merit and then divide the grade by two, assigning half the grade to each submission. If I receive more than two excessively similar submissions, I will divide the grade by the number of such submissions and distribute the result accordingly.
Since "excessive similarity" is a bit subjective, I may only give you a warning if the similarity is not too excessive—especially for a first offense. However, I will be much less inclined to be forgiving the second time. If you are concerned about the possibility of submitting something that might be too similar to another student's work, don't hesitate to speak with me first.
If you find material on the Internet or in a book that seems to answer questions I ask in an assignment, you may include such material in your submission provided you properly reference it. If I discover that you have included unreferenced material from such sources, I may not give you any credit for the question(s) answered by such material. You do not need to provide a reference to our text book or to materials I specifically provide in class.
Students with disabilities may request accommodation as provided within federal law. All such requests should be made by first contacting disabilityservices@vermontstate.edu.
Last Revised: 2025-01-21
© Copyright 2025 by Peter Chapin
<peter.chapin@vermontstate.edu>