Types of Assignments and Classes

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The class will have a variety of different “work types” - each with its own timing, grading policy, and collection with other elements. I have had to come up with new names for some things.

We will use the workbooks from the regular 559 class as reading material, a guide to other reading material, and samples of programming problems to help students figure out what they understand (and do not understand). We won’t grade workbooks the way they are graded in the regular section (you can ignore the point values and “advanced” designations) - the instructions you get will tell you how to use each workbook. We will use all the workbooks from the regular class over the course of the semester (there are 10 “regular” workbooks, 2 “project” workbooks, and 2 “tutorial” workbooks). We might create more workbooks about new topics, or let students make their own workbooks.

More details about how we will use workbooks is below under [How We Will Use Workbooks in the Honors Section](#how-we-will-use-workbooks-in-the-honors-section)

We will put the workbooks into resource bundles that collect resources that students use to learn a week’s topics. The bundles will have workbooks, links to video lectures, links to other readings, etc. There will be 6 resource bundles for the part of class where we do the “standard material.”

Students will create portfolios - collections of their work that shows their mastery of the material. These will contain one or more programs that show off the ideas. The portfolio will also include an explanation from the student of why the program shows off their mastery of the material.

For deadlines listed below: A “day” deadline means any time on that day (Madison time). 12:01AM Tuesday is not Monday. If you’re wondering about midnight exactly… don’t push it. Turns out that Canvas has some weirdness and doesn’t handle it consistently.

Assignment Types

Content Surveys

A content survey is a brief questionaire that asks students about the assigned “reading” (content bundle - so it’s reading/watching) to inform the class discussion. The goal is less to check that students have “read” it, but more to find out what we should discuss in class. There are 3 questions: Summarize the key takeaways from the material, List questions about the material (things to cover better), and List questions beyond the material (topics to go deeper into).

  • Assigned as part of a resource bundle.
  • Implemented as a Canvas Survey. Canvas automatically gives 2 pts for completing it; course staff may reduce to 1pt for insufficient response.
  • Considered as part of the engagement score: it shows that a student has engaged with the resources and is prepared for class (and is likely to be engaged in class).
  • Grading: 2pts (satisfactory or better), 1pt (something turned in), 0pt (nothing turned in)
  • Schedule: due for each of the Tuesday discussion classes
  • Strict deadline: it must be completed before class to receive credit. The deadline is the day before (end of day Monday), with a hard cutoff of an hour before class. (late assignments can’t be used for class planning)
  • AI assistants may not be used for Surveys.

Workbook Drafts

As part of a content bundle, students will be assigned some of the programming parts of the workbooks. This will provide an opportunity to try the material to check that you understand things. In Thursday “workshop” class, we will work through the assignments (and other things), so we ask that students do the work before class so they are prepared to discuss and collaborate around the assignments.

  • Assigned as part of a resource bundle.
  • Implemented through the workbook. Students get a personal repository (from GitHub classroom) that they clone, work in, commit their work, and then push to GitHub.
  • Considered as part of the engagement score: we need to check that students have at least tried to do the programming assignments so they are ready to discuss them in class.
  • Grading: 2pts (satisfactory or better), 1pt (something turned in), 0pt (nothing turned in). We check for valid attempts - not necessarily for correctness (students can revise to get things correct)
  • Schedule: due on each of the Thursday workbook workshops.
  • Strict Deadline: work must be pushed to GitHub (to give others access) before class.

Portfolio Discussions

As part of the process of deciding what to do for a workbook, students will be connected into small, online discussion groups (4 people) so that they can brainstorm ideas, help each other with implementation decisions, and provide each other with feedback.

  • Assigned as part of the portfolio assignment.
  • Implemented as a Canvas Discussion (this might change - Piazza is better for discussions, but I don’t know how to do randomized small groups).
  • Considered as part of the engagement score: students get practice articulating what they want to do, and critiquing others. Hopefully, the potential for feedback will lead to better portfolios.
  • Grading: course staff will score the level of engagement in the discussion (which should include an initial posting, and responses to others). 2pts (satisfactory or better), 1pt (something turned in), 0pt (no initial posting, or no postings beyond the initial posting).
  • Schedule: The initial posting must be made on Monday of the week a portfolio is due. This allows the discussion to start so that students are prepared for Tuesday’s “portfolio workshop”. We encourage students to start earlier.
  • Strict Deadline: the initial posting must be made on Monday so that students are ready to discussin class on Tuesdays.

Portfolios

Portfolios are the ways that students turn in programming assignments. The assignments will generally be open ended - we will give some requirements for what students need to demonstrate, and basically provide a blank page. Students will put their programs into the repositories, as well as documentation explaining what they have done and why they think it fills the requirements of the assignment.

Students will be given the ideas of the portfolio (and maybe the details) far ahead of the deadline so they can be thinking about the workbooks while they are doing the content assignments. This should motivate learning the content assignments and provide an opportunity to get a head start on making something cool.

  • Assigned as portfolio assignments.
  • Implemented using GitHub classroom (basically, we will provide a blank workbook). There is a slight catch that we need to use a Canvas survey (or some mechanism) so that students can notify course staff that the repository is ready to grade.
  • Graded with a letter grade. We will provide opportunities for early feedback, and the potential for “fixes” (although, after the deadline we prefer students move on to new things).
  • Schedule: Portfolios are due on Fridays. The week leading up to the deadline will be classes designed to help the students prepare. Also, leading up to the deadline, students will participate in the Portfolio discussions.
  • Deadline: there will be some potential for late assignments (we need to get assignments promptly so we can grade them; also we want students to move on to the next thing). The penalty for late assignments is variable: if a student takes an extra week, they effectively have twice as much time, so we might expect there assignment to be twice as good. It’s more about different expectations than penalties.

Surveys

Throughout the class, we will give surveys to get information from students. These will include checklists (to make sure students are aware of requirements), preferences (to help us plan), and feedback. In some cases, the surveys may be anonymous (we will know which students completed the survey, but not be able to connect answers back to individuals).

  • Assigned as spearate things.
  • Implemented using Canvas surveys or a Google Form.
  • Considered as part of the engagement score: we care that students complete the surveys, but not what the answers are.
  • Schedule: will be randomly timed throughout the semester. We will make announcements on Canvas.
  • Deadline: they may have strict deadlines (when we need the information by).

Types of Class Activities

In-person attendance in class is required (see Class Meetings and Attendance - please use the form if you will miss class).

We plan the following types of class structures:

Content Discussions (Tuesdays during Content Weeks)

We will use the class to discuss the topic of the “materials bundle” and workbooks. Students will have completed a Content Survey so we know what topics are interesting to discuss. We’ll discuss the parts of the required content that people found challenging so that everyone can understand the basics. We’ll also discuss topics beyond the required materials - to give people a deeper appreciation of the material.

Content Workshops (Thursdays during Content Weeks)

We will use these classes to discuss the programming assignments. Students will have tried the basic ones (by submitting drafts). We will use class time to review solutions (both student solutions and sample solutions), perform code reviews, help students figure out where they got stuck, and experiment with going beyond the requirements.

Note that we do not plan to grade/check the final workbooks. We’ll effectively give out the solutions during the Thursday workshops. We trust students to make sure they understand how the solutions work.

Portfolio Workshops (Portfolio Weeks)

These will be a discussion to brainstorm ideas for portfolios. Students will have had some online discussion before class to have ideas of what they want to do. In class, we will work together to refine these ideas - to determine both what should be done, but also give guidance on how to do it. We may have some “mini-lectures” with programming tricks or introducing advanced techniques that may of interest for the Portfolios.

Portfolio Reviews (Portfolio Weeks)

The class before the due date of a portfolio (Thursday, for a Friday deadline), we will use as an opportunity to review student portfolios and provide feedback. Students are encouraged to bring their (nearly completed - since they are due the next day) portfolios so we (student and staff) can provide feedback and critique (see My Tutorial on Critique).

Some other thoughts…

Why are we not grading the Workbooks?

We are not grading the workbooks.

A student’s ability to turn in correct answers to the work says nothing about their mastery of the material. If nothing else, sample solutions are in the CoPilot/ChatGPT training set (so the AI assistants have no problem solving them), and a little “traditional” searching will probably turn up answers. Even before AI tools got this good, students sometimes turned in code that worked (but they didn’t necessarily understand), found other sample solutions to plagiarize, etc.

As honors students, we trust you. We expect that you will put in the effort to understand how to do the problems. In some cases, it might actually be more effective to learn by analyzing an example solution than by trying it yourself. (although, there is something to be said for trying it yourself) And it’s OK to let the AI assistant do the boring parts.

We ask that you try to do the workbooks. This is important because it will help you self-assess whether you understand the material. We want you to do this before the class discussion, so we can focus the class discussion on the interesting stuff (if everyone already understands the basics, why waste class time discussing it?). This is why we require the [Content Discussions](#content-discussions-tuesdays-during-content-weeks) - less to check that you have done this (because we trust you) and more because we need to know how to make good use of class.

We will not collect (and grade) “final” workbooks. We know that you can turn in the correct answers (since we’ll give you example solutions). It’s extra effort for us to check. We’ll let you decide if you think it’s worthwhile to work through your own version of everything, or if you are comfortable enough with just reading the examples.

Part of the workbooks are the “micro-projects” designed to assess that students can apply what they’ve learned. Grading these doesn’t make sense either. So instead, for the honors section we’ll try something different… portfolios: rather than doing an assignment we designed, we’ll ask you to make up your own assignment that shows that you can apply the concepts.

How We Will Use Workbooks in the Honors Section

As part of a weekly assignment (called a “resource bundle”) you will receive GitHub Classroom links for 1 or 2 workbooks. You will follow the link (for each workbook). GitHub Classroom will create your own personal private repository with the workbook in it. You clone the workbooks (to your own computer) and go to work.

Remember: if there are two workbooks, there will be 2 Classroom Links and you will have 2 repositories. You must do both. When you want to submit your work (for your draft) you will need to commit and push both repositories!

For each workbook you should:

  1. Go to the GitHub classroom link so it creates a repository for you.
  2. Clone the repository (to make a copy on your disk)
  3. Read through the workbook - and the materials it references. You will probably want to mix this with watching the lecture videos and looking at the other resources. The videos and workbooks go together.
  4. Once you’ve gotten through the content, you should fill out the content survey (before Tuesday’s lecture - the deadline is Monday night).
  5. While reading through the workbook, try doing the assignments inside of it. They are meant to help you self-assess that you understand the material and can use it. You can skip any “advanced points” (you’ll get your opportunity to do cooler stuff in the portfolios). The assignment may also suggest that you skip the “micro-projects” in the workbooks (since we may do them in class, and/or replace them with portfolio activities).
  6. Before Thursday’s class, you need to turn in the work you’ve done in the workbooks. To do this, make sure all of the work you’ve done has been committed (to both workbooks) and this work has been pushed back to GitHub.
  7. After Thursday’s class, you should go back to the workbook and check that you understand working assignments (either by doing them yourself, or by studying someone else’s solutions).

To reiterate: we won’t be grading your work in the workbooks. We trust that you will try enough of the assignments (often called “boxes”) to self-assess that you understand, to identify what we need to discuss in class, and to have a head start on the “workshop” days.

To better understand workbooks, you can read the 2023 explanation of workbooks. You can ignore the parts about grading, since we aren’t going to grade your workbooks, and the explanation of deadlines and late policy.