Course Requirements
The following contains some information on what we expect you to do for this class, and how we will determine the grades.Examination and Grading
Your grades will consist of three parts, two individual ones, and one collective assessment:- The project itself, of course. You will work in teams, and there will be one grade for the piece of software you created in this class. This part of the grade will be the same for each team member.
- A talk about the project. We will have three talks for each project: One in the initial planning stage of the project (at the beginning of the semester), one report about your first prototype (shortly before the holiday break), and one final presentation (at the end of the semester). Of course each talk should be given by a different team member :-), and each talk will be graded individually.
- A term paper describing the project that you've implemented. The paper should contain a general description of your team's project, and provide more details on your own contribution to the project (ideally, this contribution is different for each team member). Just like the talks, term papers are graded individually. We will provide more information on what we expect for the term paper towards the end of the semester.
Homework
We will try to guide you towards the development of a running piece of software. We think that it is essential that you work on this continually, and we want to monitor your weekly progress (which can happen in your own pace - but it should happen :) ). In the first two weeks, we will give you tasks that will get you started, but once your general project is fixed, you will determine your homework yourself as weekly goals:- Each week, your team needs to set 3 goals for the upcoming week, and give time estimations for the individual tasks. We can discuss your goals in the group meeting, and we will also help you with finding your first three goals. But the development of individual goals will then become one part of your homework, too.
- In each meeting, we will re-visit your goals from the week before and compare your time estimations with the actual time you needed to finish the tasks.
- You do not need to meet all your goals, but you should try to finish at least 2 of them.
- If you don't achieve one of the goals, you need to explain what went wrong. It's not a problem at all, but rather an important part of the learning process. We actually don't expect you to meet all your goals, especially not in the beginning - but we expect you to become better at setting goals.
As this setup already implies, we expect you to take part in the group meetings, and to actively discuss the progress of your own team as well as try to give suggestions or support to the other teams.