When

Wednesday, November 19, 2025, last 60 minutes of class.

Scope

Labs 8–16, and all the associated readings in the Further Study sections.

Ground Rules

In person. It is a GROUP EXAM! Y’all take it together.

Preparation Checklist

Do each of the following to maximize your preparation:

• Attend all scheduled classes. Review the recordings for class periods you missed. Review the recordings for portions of the class sessions that you feel you need to review.
• Read and engage with all of the course notes within the scope of the exam.
• Read the assigned readings. Reading both the course notes (labs) and outside readings (especially Think Python) is empowering: you are seeing the same material presented in two different formats.
• Follow some of the links within the course notes to outside articles and videos. This gives you access to new material as well as a third presentation of the course content.
• Do the first two homework assignments. If you worked in a team, you are still responsible for understanding all of the solutions. If you were irresponsible enough to “split the work” so that you learned nothing at all about work that your teammate did, then you are not living up to your responsibilities as a student. Ask your partner to explain their work to you.
• Review and understand my solutions to the first two assignments.
• DO THE RECALL QUESTIONS IN THE NOTES PERIODICALLY. Active recall is the most powerful way to move knowledge from working memory to long-term memory.

Were you able to check off every box?

An Outline of Course Content For This Exam

The fact that active recall is better for acquiring long-term knowledge does not mean that outlines and concept maps are not useful. Learners should use multiple techniques—think “both and” rather than “either or.”

Recursion
    base case
    recursive case
    often you don’t need or want it, if a simple loop will do
    if recursion is multi-way, it tends to shine more
    (but be careful not to “overlap”—you will learn why in CMSI 2120)
    recursion in nature and art (Fractals)

Classes
    often better than dictionaries when representing ”things”
    class definitions
    __init__() method
    self parameter
    attributes
    methods
    Variables are necessary for sharing!
    Dataclass are usually better! (__init__() is auto-generated)
    Have to use the @dataclass decorator
    Have to import dataclass from the dataclasses module
    You can validate with __post_init__()

RGB Colors
    RGB tuples
    (0, 0, 0) is black
    (255, 255, 255) is white
    (255, 0, 0) is red
    (0, 255, 0) is green
    (0, 0, 255) is blue
    other colors are combinations of red, green, and blue

Pygame
    pygame.init()
    pygame.display.set_mode()
    pygame.display.set_caption()
    Event loop
    raise SystemExit after QUIT event and pygame.quit()
    pygame.event.get()
    Event types like QUIT, KEYDOWN, KEYUP, MOUSEBUTTONDOWN, MOUSEBUTTONUP
    pygame.draw.rect()
    pygame.draw.circle()
    pygame.draw.line()
    pygame.draw.polygon()
    pygame.draw.arc()
    pygame.draw.ellipse()
    pygame.display.flip()
    Colors as RGB tuples
    clock = pygame.time.Clock() and clock.tick(60) for smooth animation
    Keyboard events
    Collision detection
    Custom events

Format of the Exam

You will be presented with the problems and you will work together as a class to produce answers on the whiteboard.

About the Problems

There will be 10 questions, each of which will be writing little snippets of code.