Exercises

There are four computing exercises to be completed in the last four weeks of full Lent term; one per week. The exercises count for 0.2 units or further work, or roughly 2% of your final mark for the year. Thus each exercise should only take you a few hours. Each of the four exercises is marked out of 5 for a total of 20 marks. Marks will be awarded in proportion to the amount of each exercise you successfully complete. Successfully complete means that at the very least the relevant code should run!

You will receive a link to the exercise via email on the first day before noon (i.e. Friday 20th February for the first exercise). The deadline for every exercise is 12 noon on the final day (i.e. Friday 27th February for the first exercise).

1 How to submit

You will be using GitHub classroom to submit your work, so you will need a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.

Each week I will email you a link to a new exercise. The first time you click on one of the classroom links you will be asked to pick your identifier (CRSid) in order to join the classroom. Let me know if your id is missing. Please make sure you click the right CRSid! If you click someone else’s they won’t be able to get theirs and I will have to manually reassign them 😡.

Once you accept the assignment, GitHub will create a repository called <exercise-name>-<your-username> in the Part-II-Computational-Physics organization on GitHub. This repository will contain the exercise description. Please change the name of the repo to <exercise-name>-<CRSid> for ease of marking. Only you and the course admins (the demonstrators and me) can see this repo.

Note that there is no explicit “submit” button. You submit your work by making changes (“commits”) to the repository on GitHub (if you make commits to a copy of the repository on your computer, you must “push” them to GitHub). You can make as many commits as you like up until the deadline. Note that you can continue to add commits to the repo after the deadline, but only the last commit before the deadline is counted as the submission.

The policy on late submission of coursework is described in the Physics course handbook (Section 7). Note in particular that applications for extensions should be made by submitting this form, not by contacting me directly.

Please use the discussions section to ask questions to your demonstrators (about the exercises) and me (about everything else). Treat the discussions as if they are a real life examples class where others can learn from your questions and the answers to them.

If you’ve never used GitHub before, you can try out the starter course.

2 The exercises

2.1 First exercise: PDEs

The first exercise concerns solving a simple PDE using different methods. Your demonstrator for this exercise is Arshad Kamal. The deadline is 12 noon on Friday 27th February.