Current Students
Laboratory Courses
I am pleased to announce that starting Autumn 2008 the CSPP will be offering Laboratory courses throughout the academic year. These will be half-credit courses that can be used for elective credit. Two lab courses will be the equivalent of one CSPP course and can be counted towards graduation. The courses will be offered on five Saturdays throughout the quarter; dates and times for each lab will be posted on the course schedule. Some of the labs have prerequisites.
These courses have several objectives. In the overall scheme of the CSPP curriculum, they allow students with relatively little practical computing experience, or limited experience in a particular area to acquire it. It allows the instructor to assign more substantial computing projects than in a typical CSPP course. These are “hands on” courses, where students have to contend with real life systems, with their idiosyncrasies and imperfections. Obviously, a laboratory is not a substitute for actual work with commercial systems, at a workplace or in a project, but it provides a nontrivial exposure to these systems, and to the challenges presented by them. In order to get the most from such a course, the student should be familiar with the principles underlying the intended application—this is why some of the courses have prerequisites.
The specific on-campus venues and times will vary, and will be announced for each course. Students will work with the instructor and with the TA in the lab, and have two weeks to finish the assignment.
We expect the workload of these labs to be roughly half of a “normal” course workload, but since one of the objectives is to acquire practical “computing chops”, it is likely that different students will get them at different speeds, and the time they will need to compete the assignments will differ. We will provide additional support also outside the lab hours, through the internet.
The courses offered for Academic Year 2009–2010 are:
- Fall 2009: Unix Systems Administration Lab
- Winter 2010: Networks Lab
- Spring 2010: Architecture & Design of OO Frameworks Lab
- Summer 2010: Security Lab
Details of the Fall course can be found on the CSPP website through a link from the Course Schedule: information on the othe labs will follow.
If you have any questions about specific labs or the prerequisites, please contact the individual instructors.
