Teaching Staff
Prof: Cinda Heeren 📧 cheeren@cs.ubc.ca ⏰ Mon 2–4pm · 🏢 ICCS 233 ·
TA: Minh Anh Nguyen 📧
TA: Joel Gunawan 📧
You!
Turn to your neighbor and introduce yourself 👋
Together, come up with one binary question about in half
Examples:
Coke or Pepsi?
Spaghetti or Sushi?
Morning person or Night owl?
The Flashlight Game 🔦
Rules:
Everyone starts in play
Each turn, a student poses a valid yes/no question
YES = turn on your phone flashlightNO = keep it dark
YES people are now on vacation 🌴
A question is valid if it puts at least 5 and no more than half of the current group on vacation.
End of Game:
We stop when 10 or fewer people remain in play
Everyone else is happily on vacation 🌴
How to Count
I only need to count the lights (YES)
The rest (dark screens) = NO
Eliminated = never light up again
Start w 150 (say) pose question 1, 5 <= k1 <= 150/2 lights -> 150-k1 remain. pose 2, 5 <= k2 lights <= (150-k1)/2 -> 150-k1-k2 remain. pose question 3, 5 <= k3 <= (150-k1-k2)/2 -> 150-k1-k2-k3 remain. etc.
Debrief 💡
Punchline questions:
We know we will need at least ______ questions.
We know we will need no more than ______ questions.
Why did we stop at 10 instead of 1?
Why did we do this?
Best case: keep halving ⇒ about log₂(150/10) ≈ 4 rounds
Worst case: only 5 eliminated each round ⇒ ~28 rounds
Stopping at 10 = “small enough to brute force”
About This Course
This course will teach you a bunch of different things!
Tools: Terminal, Markdown, Git, marimo, PrairieLearn
Computer science: Python (!!!), efficiency, web scraping, graphs
Data science: pandas, data frames, visualizations
Algorithms: many algorithms!
Art and creativity: lots of examples!
Term Schedule
1
8/31/2025
🎉
2
9/7/2025
🎉 🎉 🏎️ 🏋️
3
9/14/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🤩 🏎️ 🏋️
4
9/21/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🏎️ 🏋️
5
9/28/2025
🎉 🪄 🤩 🏎️ 🏋️
6
10/5/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🏎️ 🏋️
7
10/12/2025
8
10/19/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🤩 🏎️ 🏋️
9
10/26/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🏎️ 🏋️
10
11/2/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🤩 🏎️ 🏋️
11
11/9/2025
12
11/16/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🏎️ 🏋️
13
11/23/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🤩 🏎️ 🏋️
14
11/30/2025
🎉 🎉 🪄 🏋️
Evaluation
Problems of the Week
10% (10 x 1%)
Fridays at 6 PM
Labs
5% (10 x 0.5%)
Fridays at 6 PM
Programming Projects
9% (3 x 3%)
Three in the term
Examlets.
50% (5 x 10%)
~ Bi-weekly
Final Exam
26%
TBD
Communications
Cinda
Mon 2–4pm
🏢 ICCS 233 ·
Minh Anh
TBD
🏢 TBD
Joel
TBD
🏢 TBD
TBD
TBD
🏢 TBD
Semester overview
Design
Objects
Iteration
Web Scraping
Data Frames
MatPlotLib
Voronoi Diagrams
Efficiency
Markov Chains
Random Numbers
Graphs
Traveling Salesperson
Intractable Problems
Natural Language
This course consists of a sequence of six explorations, assembled to provide a tour through data structure applications and algorithmic design. Built around topics from arts, sciences, and technology, the explorations are thought provoking and engaging. You will emerge from the course with increased proficiency in Python programming, and with a broad spectrum of tools for algorithmic problem solving.
Define a small working group of size up to 4.
One of you share: https://mathigon.org/tangram
Solve as many as you’d like, together
Speculate together on why you’re doing this!!
Piazza piazza.com/ubc.ca/winterterm12025/cpsc203
