Unit Organisation

Prerequisites

We require an A* grade in mathematics at A-levels, or an equivalent qualification, to join the Computer Science degree. You have chosen to enrol in one of the better universities in the country and that means we trust you are able to identify by yourself where you have gaps in your previous knowledge, and to deal with this for example by independently teaching yourself missing topics with the help of books in the library or online resources - there are free videos online on every part of A-level mathematics.

Schedule

In 2023-24, this unit will run with in-person lectures and workshops, like most units did before the pandemic.

The teaching schedule is:

• Weeks 1 (Mon 25 Sep 2023) to 5: teaching weeks
• Week 6 (Mon 30 Oct 2023): reading week, no lectures or workshops, no new material.
• Weeks 7 (Mon 6 Nov 2023) to 11: teaching weeks
• Week 12 (Mon 11 Dec 2023): revision week - no lectures, no new material, workshops replaced with drop-ins.

Each teaching week, we will have two blocks of content; each block contains:

• An in-person lecture (attendance “highly recommended”).
• Written lecture notes, to read in your own time - see materials page.
• An in-person workshop (attendance mandatory and enforced - see workshops page).
• Exercise sheets, to be completed in groups in the workshops.
• Solutions to the exercise sheets (released after the workshop).

This means there will be 20 workshops/blocks in total. Four of the workshops will be class tests instead of exercise sheets.

The teaching timetable is not finalised yet; I will update this page with the exact times when it is.

In the teaching weeks, there will also be an optional 1-hour drop-in session - this is instead of an “office hour”, it’s the same idea but in a bigger room than my office so more students can come along.

Communication and Scalability

In 2023-24, we are expecting 175-200 students, and this unit is taught by a single lecturer. This has some consequences for how we work together to keep everything running smoothly:

• Your main sources of support will be the scheduled workshops and drop-ins. You must not expect immediate help at any other time.
• Questions outside the scheduled hours must go on the Microsoft Teams forum. We will answer them as soon as resonably possible during working hours. (You may post a question on Teams at 11pm on a weekend if you want to, but you will not get an answer until 9am next Monday at the earliest.)
• You must not e-mail, phone, or private message the lecturer individually with questions about the material: this does not scale, and is unfair to other students. Instead, you must ask in the official forum, where we can reply once and then all students can see the same information, or you may ask in the next workshop or drop-in.
• You will not get extra private lessons from the lecturer or the TAs, please do not ask for this. If you are a disabled student, there may be extra support available for you through disability services and you should check with them, not your lecturer, about this.

Drop-in sessions replace “office hours” on this unit: they serve the same purpose, but are held in a larger room than my office, so there is space for (hopefully) as many students as want to turn up.

Study Guide

Here is a rough guide to time planning for a newly starting student.

In each teaching block of Year 1, you will take 3 units all worth an equal amount (20 credits each). While you will all have some units you find easier or harder, as a rough average:

• Expect to treat your degree like a job where you turn up and work regular hours every week; if your plan is “maybe do some work shortly before the exams” then based on past years’ data you are very likely to end up being required to withdraw - students can and do fail exams in Bristol.
• Assuming you work 42 hours a week during term time - which is not too far off the average in Europe - then that gives 14 hours/week on average for each of your three units.
• Maths A has 2h/week lectures and 4h/week workshops, for a total of 6h/week. Therefore, that leaves 8h/week individual study time for you.

As a general rule, a successful student will spend more time on individual study for each unit each week, than they have contact hours (lectures, workshops, labs etc.). You are expected to be able to plan and manage your own time - you will not succeed on this degree unless you can achieve this, but ask your personal tutor if you need advice.

For Maths A, for each block,

• Before coming to the workshop, you should attend the lecture and read the lecture notes for the block; it is up to you which order you prefer to do this in. The lecture is to the notes what a film is to a book: the lecture is a selection of the key scenes, but always not enough to understand the whole plot on its own. You need both the lecture and the notes to be able to understand the material.
• During the workshop, you work in groups on the exercises as directed by the lecturer or a teaching assistant (TA). The workshops are also opportunities for you to ask the TAs questions about anything in the unit so far - including from past weeks. (You can look at the exercises before the workshop, but this is not required.)
• After the workshop, go over the material and exercises for the whole block again, check your solutions against the sample ones when they are released, complete any exercises not done in the workshop, and if something is not clear then make a note so you can ask about it in the next workshop.

The workshops are the main place for you to ask questions, so make use of the TAs who are paid to help you during these hours.

Class Tests

In some weeks, a workshop will be replaced with a class test. The marks from these do not count towards your unit mark, they are purely for you to be able to assess your own progress on the unit and to practice the format of the final exam.

Completing the class tests and handing in your answer sheets is mandatory, but failing them has no consequences (beyond encouraging you to improve on the next one). The class tests are your main practice opportunities for the final exam.

Technology

This unit, like most of the university, runs on the Microsoft technology stack. We use Microsoft Teams for online discussion and to host the unit materials.

The university has limited lecture recording abilities that only really work for recording presentations given via computer, not proper lectures using the boards - for example, where there are cameras, they usually do not capture all the boards, and they do not work all of the time. You should therefore assume that any lecture recordings for this unit will be somewhere between non-existing and non-useful, and you should not plan to rely on them.

Instead, you should attend all the lectures you can, and if you miss one due to illness or other good cause, use the lecture notes to revise and maybe ask a friend on the unit to share any notes they made during the lecture, then ask the TAs in the next workshop if something is not clear.