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 14, 2011 in lecture. 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 (below), and to review the Fall 2010 quest: