Students are responsible for material that is disseminated during class. If you miss class, please arrange beforehand with a friend to get notes/handouts for you. If you know you are going to miss something, contact the instructor beforehand. It's much easier to accommodate planned absences.
Students are responsible for all material taught in this course. If you join the class later in the quarter, you are expected to complete all missed work immediately.
How to annoy a professor: Ask him or her if you missed anything important.
Participation is part of your grade. Participation will be evaluated through the use of index cards in class.
The primary place where announcements will be made will be in class.
This term we will be using Piazza for outside-of-class discussion. Piazza has been contracted by UCI to offer their service. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza. If you have any technical problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com. Find our class page at: https://piazza.com/class/i6xzv0rok6m192
A welcome post is up on Piazza. If you don't see it, please investigate the problem so that you do not miss required information.
If you decide to not to use a private message on Piazza and instead email the course staff, please include the class code, "[ICS 163]", at the beginning of the subject line. If you do not get a response to the email in 24 hours (except weekends), please resend it or talk to me after class. I highly recommend using the Piazza system so that the entire class benefits from the discussion (public posts only). Personal issues can be addressed through Piazza private messages, email, or a face to face meeting.
The late penalty is 1% per hour after the due date.
Due dates are specified with a date and time in local time.
For example, if an assignment's due date is 11:59pm on Monday night and it is turned in on 11:59pm Tuesday night it is 24 hours late will be result in a 24% penalty.
If you find that you are unable to make it to a scheduled event (class, exam, presentation, etc.) due to sickness, please get some documentation from a health care provider to assist us in maintaining fairness to the other students in the class. In the absence of such documentation, please contact the staff as soon as you realize that you are going to miss a scheduled event. Generally sicknesses will be treated on a case by case basis. We will accommodate you as best as we can depending on the circumstances.
Electronic Add/Drop only. Standard University time lines apply.
The prerequisites are there for a reason, so if you are asking me to waive them, please be prepared to do an assignment to justify it.
I will only offer an incomplete grade to a student who, through some unforeseen emergency, is unable to complete the requirements of the course.
Every quarter I fail students for cheating. Will it be you this quarter?
This is not a job. This is a class. Someone is paying me to make sure that you learn about mobile and ubiquitous games. When I give you assignments, it isn't because I want to know the answer. I know the answer. I want you to do the hard work of finding out the answer in a particular way. This is how you learn something. You can give me a "correct" answer that you obtained in an incorrect way. That isn't the goal. Let me repeat. I know the answer. Your grade is about you learning. Academic Honesty is about getting the answers in the right way so that you actually learn. Some of the things you do in this class will therefore be inefficient and difficult.
You may never use anyone else's work without clearly acknowledging the source. This includes code you find on the web, text from books, and answers from friends. Doing so is called plagiarism.
Plagiarism is any work that you use that you did not create and do not credit. If you plagiarize another work without crediting the source, you will receive a failing grade for the entire course at the discretion of the instructor. It takes 2 seconds to cite your source. If you want to be intellectually lazy, do something else with your life.
However, if an assignment requires you to do the work yourself, and you copy work from another source, but acknowledge it, then you did not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. This is also grounds for failing an assignment.
This has happened in my courses before, it has happened in conferences that I have chaired and I have sat in conferences in which others have presented my work verbatim. In each of these cases I took the strongest possible recourse available to me at the time. Our global academic system relies on properly creditting sources for everything to function.
My colleagues and I have kicked students out of UCI for cheating in our courses. Here is a list of cheating incidents at UCI that were dealt with at the university level.
Please familiarize yourself with the latest UCI academic honesty policy: http://www.editor.uci.edu/catalogue/appx/appx.2.htm.
Please read a more detailed definition of plagiarism defined by the ACM: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy.
Please watch a tutorial on Academic Honesty at UCI.
The calendar web page for the class is subject to update. Check it frequently and be sure to refresh / reload the web pages when you browse them.
Please follow the assignments exactly. If you need clarification, ask before the assignment is due.
Any student who feels he or she may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability, religious observance (or anything else) should contact me privately to discuss his or her specific needs. If appropriate, contact the Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.