Following the tutorial class each week, there will be a two-hour laboratory class, during which you will work on a variety of small practical problems involving the tools introduced in lectures. Because this course has a significant practical component, laboratory classes are important. If you do not put a good amount of effort into the lab classes, you risk failing the final exam.

Each week, there will be one or more exercises to work on. These exercises will be released in the week preceding the lab class.

During the lab, your tutor will provide feedback on your approach to the problem and on the style of your solution. Some labs may contain exercises which will be assessed during the lab.

Completed exercises need to be submitted. You must submit exercises before the deadline using give to obtain a mark for a lab exercise, The usual lab exercise submission deadline will be 12:00 (midday) Monday some lab exercises may have an extended deadline.

The lab exercises for each week are worth in total 2 marks. All of your lab marks will be summed to give you a mark out of 18; if their sum exceeds 15, your total mark will be capped at 15.

Most labs include one or more challenge exercises. Challenge exercises may involve concepts not covered in lectures and they range in difficulty from not-very-hard to almost-impossible.

The contribution of challenge exercises to lab marks will be limited to 20%; hence you can obtain nearly all (over 95%) marks available for the lab component without completing challenge exercises.

If you wish to obtained a high mark for COMP1521, attempting some challenge exercises is highly recommended.

If your goal is just to master the core material and pass COMP1521, you can ignore challenge exercises.