The high-order bit is that the quest is only worth 5% of your grade, so don't get too stressed about the exam. We're going to be aiming the difficulty of the exam relatively low, so if you've been coming to class and lab, and doing your homework and readings, you should do quite well.
The quest will be taking place on Monday, February 13th, 2012 from 3-4pm.
Sections 1-4 will come to 10 Evans, sections 5-8 need to go to 390 Hearst Mining.
It will be entirely paper-based and no laptops will be allowed. Anything we've done in class or in the readings (except discussions, these vary by TA and are meant for reinforcement of existing content and addressing student questions) is fair game. We usually divide the course (and exam) into two sections:
Approximately half of the points will be from Big Ideas of Computing, and these will most likely be fill-in-the-blank or short response. The other half of the exam will be Programming Concepts, and these will involve debugging short blocks of code, identifying what a provided block or algorithm does, or similar exercises.
Do not worry about the "memoized" section of the algorithms lab. (This was provided as a critical thinking exercise but it isn't necessary to understand it to do well on the quest.)
The three best ways to study are to review the materials we've been over (labs, readings, lectures, homework), to attend the review session, and to review recent public quests below:
The quest will be similar in scope to last semester's version, and the topics and readings for both versions of the course should be similar enough that the actual questions should be answerable for you in most cases. Reviewing homework exercises are also a good idea in order to reinforce lab concepts. We always encourage students to form study teams, feel free to use Piazzza to organize that based on living group or interest or lab...