From Week 4 a large part of this module is a group project, worth 60% of your mark. This page is the short version: what you will build, how it is marked, and what to do this week.
In a group of four you build a Python library that provides tools for a mathematical problem of your choice. The brief is deliberately broad. There are eight complete worked example projects on this site, written at the level of a good submission; read them as a model rather than as a ceiling.
Eight files: the paper source, the paper PDF and the bibliography; the library, its tests and the README; the recording of your presentation and the record of contributions. Each is described in the submission requirements.
Every component is graded. You do not need to be the strongest coder in the group to earn full marks, since the paper, the documentation, the tests and the minutes are all marked too.
Your mark is not simply your group's mark. It combines an individual score with the group's score using a geometric mean, described in full in the marking scheme, with worked scenarios showing how it behaves.
The individual half of that, \(I\), comes from the minutes your group hands in. There is one form for each group-project week, in Weeks 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10, and \(I\) is the fraction of those five at which the minutes record you as having engaged. The minutes are the only record of it: a week with no form handed in counts for nobody in the group. The Week 4 form is completed and handed in during the Week 4 class itself.
There is no lecture on the programming topics covered in the group-project weeks. You work through those chapters of Python for Mathematics on your own:
Yes, this is self study, and it is self study with a social component. The reading is solitary; working out what it meant is not. The first standing item on every meeting agenda is each member reporting what they covered since the last meeting, which is where you find out what you misunderstood and where you help someone else do the same. Reading a chapter, not understanding it, and saying so in the meeting is exactly what the structure expects of you.
The textbook has tutorials, how-to recipes, exercises and full solutions for every topic, so you are not working without support. You are working without a lecture.
Group work is on your timetable: you are not expected to find a free hour between four diaries. Each timetabled session holds a short meeting. The secretary writes the minutes, and the group hands them in at the contact hour. The project work itself you fit around that, on your own or together in a workshop; neither of those is the meeting.