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Learning Activities and Submitted Work

Summary

Most of your learning in the course will come about through the following learning activities. Some additional detail is provided further down this page.

Attendance. Perhaps more so than in other courses, attendance is critical. We will not only explain the somewhat strange quantum concepts in class, but will also solve problems. Just as importantly, responses to student questions will be useful to everyone.

Narrative notetaking. This learning activity is particularly important for undergraduates and Masters' students without prior exposure to a quantum course of any kind. You will take pride in writing your own weekly class notes using the material in this course. This is, perhaps surprisingly, a critical part of your learning. There's more to it, as we'll explain below.

In-class (module) exercises. These are exercises embedded within each module, ideal for exploring key concepts. We will do many of them in class, but you will be responsible for completing all of them after class.

Solved problems. Many modules link to a page of solved problems. These are worth reading through and trying to do on your own alongside your own solution to module exercises.

Preparing for the final exam. As you'll see, both the narrative note-taking and module exercises, along with attendance, together form the basis for exam preparation.

Narrative note-taking

Note to PhD students: if you've taken a whole bunch of quantum courses already, this part may be substituted with an alternative.

The famous mathematician George Polya once said "Mathematics is not a spectator sport". By that he meant, you learn math by doing rather than just by reading or listening. One type of doing is solving problems, which is often given the highest priority in math education. However, an equally important companion in doing math is high-quality note-taking.

Even within note-taking, the most common kind is what occurs in the classroom: short notes to copy down what occurs in class, with the aim of substituting for perfect memory. But the better kind is narrative note-taking in which you build your own narrative about the material you are studying. By laying out the main ideas in your own notebook, you have the best shot at "bringing it all together" and retaining for the long-term.

So ... what you will do is build a narrative of the key concepts in that you will submit pieces of electronically. Think of this as on-going review notes that teach yourself now (a review) and later in life (recalling the most important concepts).

What to write:

The main goal in narrative note-taking is to explain key points in the material to yourself, in your own words, and neatly, with pride.

For any theoretical result, explain what the theorem or proposition is saying in words.

For any other key concept, write a couple of sentences that explain the concept as if you were explaining to a like-minded, same-level-as-you friend.

Write out all derivations with the following approach: first read through and then try to write without looking at the modules.

You can create original content in other ways too. For example you can intuitively explain a definition or fact with your own diagram or example.

Important: You will submit your weekly narrative notes in PDF. You can either write by hand in a notebook and scan, or you can typeset in a document and convert to PDF.

Notebook organization:
Organize your notebook into three sections:

Prep-I: Linear Algebra Review
Prep-II: Remainder of Review (math/computing)
Main section:
- This part will be organized by week because we may not cover all parts of a module in a particular week. For example, for the Week-4 submission, you will write notes on all the material we covered during Week-4.
- One subsection per week, beginning with Week-3. (There is no Week-1 nor Week-2).
- In some modules, not all the material needs to be included in your notes. For the following modules, include at least these specified sections:
  - Module 6: 6.6, 6.8
  - Module 7: 7.2 (only the meaning, not the derivation), 7.4
  - Module 8: 8.2, 8.3, 8.5
You will scan each of these and upload as PDFs.

Note:

Do NOT include the module exercises in your notes. It is advisable, however, to do the exercises separately (since you will be submitting them) and concurrently along with your notes.
Much of quantum computing will be unfamiliar and so, doing your notes weekly will help you review and set you up for maximal understanding in each class.
The final exam will feature questions from the same material, as well as based on the module exercises. Therefore, if you take good notes, you will be preparing for the final and will be enabling an efficient review later.
Module 1 is not included in either narrative notes or module exercises. You do not have to submit anything for Module 1.

In-class exercises

We will touch upon many in-class (module) exercises in class itself, as one of the main learning activities of the course. However, because we have limited time in class, we will assign some to complete ahead of time, possibly rush through some of these in class, and skip yet others. You will need to complete these on your own outside of class.

The best time to complete in-class exercises is before the next class. It will increase your learning efficiency by helping you keep up with the next class. If, on the other hand, you postpone completing these, you will merely accumulate more and more "unfinished business" that will slow down your rate of learning.

Get organized by creating a main directory for the course, then one sub-directory for the in-class exercises of each module.

What you will submit is a single PDF for each module.

You do not need to submit exercises for Module 1.

Submission

Make one folder for each module, and one for each assignment. So, you will have, for example, a module3 folder.

Use a single PDF for each module that will have your response to all of these.
Important: Your text answers will need to be supported by reasoning. Simply answering "Yes" is not sufficient.

Then, make a zip of the folder and submit to Blackboard in the appropriate folder.

Similarly, submit one PDF for each week's narrative notes, and one PDF each for Prep-I and Prep-II notes.

Thus, the PDFs you will be submitting over the course will look like this:

Narrative notes: PrepI.pdf, PrepII.pdf, week3.pdf, week4.pdf, ..., week12.pdf
Solutions to module exercises: module2.pdf, module3.pdf, ..., module8.pdf, module10.pdf
(No submissions for modules 1, 9, 11, 12.)

Writing math with Latex

Latex or its precursor, Tex, is the preferred formatting language used to write mathematics. It's a language in the sense that HTML is a language: a variety of commands that describe content, layout, and presentation. Unlike HTML, however, it's harder to learn at first and can sometimes be annoying if you want to do complicated things.

A brief history. In the old days, math formatting was either non-existent for ordinary users or available only to sophisticated publishers with expensive machines. Besides, there were no standards and it was impossibly to share anything electronically. Computer science pioneer Donald Knuth (you should read about him) developed Tex and Metafont to address both font generation (Metafont) and mathematical typesetting (Tex). It took the world by storm. Latex is a small improvement over Tex devised by another computer science pioneer, Leslie Lamport, to simplify Tex by building on top of Tex. It is now the standard for math typesetting.

It works roughly like this. You first write down your math on paper. Then, you create a plain text file with latex commands and the math in it. This file will be named something like myexample.tex. Then you run "latex" like you would compile a Java program, except that you'll be compiling the file myexample.tex. The result will be a PDF file that you can print.

We will not be teaching you to use Latex. There are a zillion tutorials and examples. It's a good exercise to go through the steps: download and install, then try someone else's examples, then write a few of your own.

Grade breakdown

Important:

The numbers below are only preliminary. Because this is the first time the course is being offered, the points and weights are likely to change.

Don't pay attention to the points listed in Blackboard. Blackboard forces points to be written and so I've used "100" as a placeholder.

About grades and points:

Point breakdown:

Learning activity	Undergrads	Master's	PhD
Module exercises	2500	2500	2500
Narrative notes	1500	1500	?
Attendance	1000	1000	1000
Exam	1000	1000	1000

The above breakdown and relative weighting of points is only intended as a rough guideline and is subject to change.

There are no fixed boundaries for letter grades and thus letter grades may depend on the relative performance of others in the course.

Undergrads and grads will have a separate grading scale for final letter grades.

The instructional team reserves the right to question students about their submitted work. A failure to sufficiently explain may be construed as unfamiliarity or mere luck, in which case points may be taken off, or the weighting of accrued points in determining the final letter grade may be adjusted for such students.

See the About section for late policy.
If you do an outstanding job with the narrative notes, there will be bonus points that can be used to offset a weak exam score.