We made a subjective evaluation (based on the writeup and demo, if you had one) that assessed presentation as well as content. We graded things on an A-F scale.

2/5 of the grade was supposed to be for doing the initial phases of the project (proposal, updates, etc.). Everyone did reasonably well at meeting the requirements, so we gave everyone an AB for that phase.

If your final result got an A, you got an A. If your final result got less than an A, it was weighted averaged with the AB (so if you got a B for the final result, we gave you a 3.2). (this can only raise your score).

For assigning final grades, we checked to make sure that raising your subjective grade to the next step wouldn’t effect your grade. The one case where this may have made a difference, and we examined this one closely.

If you are wondering… 13 people got As for their projects, 5 got ABs. Many of the projects graded below that had special circumstances.

We will send individual feedback by email, however, it might not happen until after May 23rd.

(there will be an explanation of the Project 2 grading later)

Your grade is the simple average (1/3 1/3 1/3) of:

1. Project 1
2. Project 2
3. Other Stuff

Other Stuff is the simple average (1/3 1/3 1/3) of:

1. In-class Participation
2. Assignments (2/5=3 seek and critiques, 2/5=Design Challenge and Redesign, 1/5=Midterm). Since most people did most of the things well, the mean was higher than an AB.
3. On-line participation

In class participations was half of the “subjective” evaluation you were sent at the half-way point, and half of a subjective evaluation of the second half.

On-line participation was determined by the average of 3 different grades:

1. The number of required reading postings you completed (e.g. did the posting for). There were 19, 6 people did all 19. 11 people were given As for getting 18 or more.  12 people were given “ABs” for getting 15 or more. Most other people got B’s for 12 or more (one person only did 11).
2. A subjective evaluation where the TA selected a few posts and scored them based on completeness, connection to text, and connection to other ideas. (3 posts were checked * 3 categories * 1-3 scores). 10 people got As for 24/27 or higher, 11 got ABs, 5 got Bs, and one negative outlier got a BC.
3. A quantiative assessment of how many postings you made. The median was 34. You got an A for 35 or more, and AB for 31 or more, and a B for 26 or more (26 was the fewest).

Everyone got between a B and an A for online participation.

We will send you email with these basic scores. We will also send detailed project 2 feedback.

One person sent me a P2 self evaluation, which reminded me that I didn’t give you instructions for them.

I will not look at self-evaluations until after we have graded the project (after reading it, we may adjust your grade if you were at a borderline). So, you can turn it in until Wednesday, 5/13 at 5pm.

Using the questions from P1 is fine. They are:

1. How happy are you with the outcome?
2. What went right/wrong in your project? What would you do the same/different?
3. What will you do the same/differently on the next project?
4. What advice would you give to someone else proposing to do this project in the future?
5. The cliché is to ask about what you learned from the experience. This is good self-reflection practice, but may already be described above.

However, #3 doesn’t make as much sense. Instead, I would prefer if you consider the following questions:

1. How happy are you with the outcome?
2. What went right/wrong in your project? What would you do the same/different?
3. What advice would you give to someone else proposing to do this project in the future?
4. If you worked in a group, how did you split the workload?
5. What could we have done to better connect the class content to projects? What could we (the course staff) have done to have made this project a better experience for you (or students in general)?
6. The cliché is to ask about what you learned from the experience. This is good self-reflection practice, but may already be described above.

In general, we are really interested in getting feedback on the course. It’s still a work in progress. So if you have thoughts on what we could do better or differently (or what you think works and shouldn’t be changed), please let us know. If you want to do it anonymously, please put a printed page in my mailbox.

If you need to give a final demo, please sign up for a time slot on Tuesday, May 15th on the doodle poll at:  http://www.doodle.com/uy2u3e5if5mwhbkc

Each group should sign up for one (and only one) time slot.

Remember, your projects must be handed in by Monday, May 14th, 10am.

On Friday, May 4, the “handin plan” is due. The project page says little more than “expect instructions.” Well, this is it.

There are two goals here:

1. We need to predict what you will be delivering to us, so that we can figure out how you should transmit it to us.
2. We want to get an idea of what to expect, so we can have the opportunity to catch problems where projects aren’t going to meet expectations early.

So, on Friday May 4th (preferably before noon), please send the instructor and TA a note saying:

1. What you expect to have to turn in. Will it just be a big PDF? Will it be a ZIP with code and an excutable? Is there a lot of data? How big? (it’s not practical for you to deliver more than a few MB by email). Do you have some mechanism for putting it on the web?
2. Will you have a demo to run? If so, will you be able to put it on the web so we can try it? Even if we can try it, we will probably want to schedule a time to look at it and discuss it with you. (we want to get a sense of how many demos to schedule).
3. How is the project progressing? Give us a sense of where you’ve gotten to and where you expect to get to. (a few sentences – maybe 2 paragraphs – just enough so we get a sense).

As far as when things are due: according to University policy, things must be due the last day of class. However, we will have an “email blackout” between Wednesday May 9th at noon and Monday, May 14th at 10am. Anything sent during this time will be considered as handed in at May 9th, but won’t be looked at until the 14th. In fact, we’d prefer that you didn’t send us things until Sunday the 13th (since we’ll both be traveling).

So, the deadline for us to receive your project materials is really Monday, May 14th at 10am. This is a pretty firm deadline, since we need to grade it quickly.

You will at least need to send us your written report by email (if it’s a small enough PDF, otherwise send a web link) by this time, and have some arrangement for us to get other files.

One last reading. I was tempted to skip it to let you focus on projects, but I think it’s a really important topic.

One Monday, May 7th, we’ll talk about the perception of 3D. We might get to talking about visualizing 3D phenomena, but I am not sure if we’ll get that far. The Piazza posting is optional. But I am curious as to which readings you looked at, and what you think of them.

The readings are:

• Chapter 5 of Visual Thinking for Design (the textbook).
• James Todd. The Visual Perception of 3D Shape. Trends in Cognitive Science. 2004. A nice, compact article.

These are semi-optional – I’d like you to look at them and get a sense. Skim the motivations, look at the pictures.

• Amy and Bruce Gooch. Using Non-Photorealistic Rendering to Communicate Shape. SIGGRAPH ‘99 course notes here. (this is better than the original, but seminal paper. you don’t need to read it in detail – just skim through the motivation and look at the pictures.
• Cipriano and Gleicher. Molecular Surface Abstraction.
• Look at the light collages web page (but it links to the initial version of the paper – if you want to read more, check below).

I really wanted to add a few things that show how to effectively use the cues in visualization. But this is just so huge and broad that I don’t know where to start. I’ll mention some of my favorites (some of these are seminal pieces, where there is lots of follow on. some of these are:

• Lee, et al. Geometry-Dependent Lighting. IEEE Trans of Vis and Comp Graphics. (ieee official version). Note: this paper is the extended version of the original Light Collages paper.
• SIGGRAPH 2008 Course notes “Line Drawings from 3D Models” http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/proj/sg08lines/ – These are nice slides that summarize the topic very well.
• DeCarlo, et al. Suggestive Contours for Conveying Shape. Proc. SIGGRAPH 2003. (pdf) (project). The 2003 paper is really seminal, the web page lists some of the follow-ons.
• Linedemann and Ropinski.  About the Influence of Illumination Models on Image Comprehension in Direct Volume Rendering. IEEE Vis 2011. (page here)

Overall, everyone who submitted something did at least a good job.

There was variance. Some are more insightful than others. Some more directly addressed the question (how does the research utilize class concepts), while others critiqued the tool itself. Still others decided to praise the tool (sometimes in ways that didn’t necessarily add). I will account for at least some of the variance by the way the question was phrased.

But, Almost all the things were (at least) good. There were a few (4) that were just OK (and one that might have been a little less than OK). But since I am not sure I can objectively qualify why things fell into these different bins, I think its more fair just to say that those who didn’t do “good” legitimately had different ideas about the assignment.

So, everyone who turned it in gets “100%.” We’ll count this as a “written participation” – but emphasize it more than the individual Piazza assignments.

To the person who did a visual critique of the paper: you are totally right! I can’t tell you how hard it was to cram everything in to 10 pages. And it really does show (the paper is way too dense).

Everyone should get have gotten their P1 grades sent to the email address that my mailer thinks of.

Notes on how grading was computed are available here.

There were many cool projects. It’s too bad we didn’t have a forum to share them (like presentations). Maybe we’ll do something (optional) at the end.

The diversity of projects was pretty remarkable. It made it challenging to find a (relatively) fair way to grade them all.

(note: I have assigned grades as of noon, 4/28/2012 – but I have not mailed them to you yet)

Project Scoring Rubric:

N=5 or 6 (weeks)

1. 1/N – did you do all of the pieces (most people get 100%)
2. 1/N – proposal & revision (lenient scoring – most people get 100%)
3. 1/N – final material quality (clarity, completeness, … – generous scoring)
4. (N-3)/N – content quality

Note: the content quality mixes in to other parts as well. The content expectations are higher for longer projects.

Note: for 838, the "meets expectations" level for 2&3 gets you an AB. #1 is basically a freebie A. For 638, the 1&2 meets expectations level gets an A (and 3 gets an AB). We are generous on these parts so we can be honest/harsh on #4.

In terms of the 5/6 week thing: note that if you took the extra week, your actual content was more important to your grade (makes sense, since you had an extra week for that, but the same amount of time for the mechanics). Since, generally, scores are higher for 1-3 than 4, this works out.

#1 All Parts:

We counting up all the different parts. Most people turned in everything (including summary)

• initial contact/reply (a few people didn’t meet the letter of the law, was only counted against you if the next two things were problematic
• one person missed phase 2, but arguably thought their initial proposal was OK
• one person effectively missed phase 1 & 2
• everyone had the summary (but 1 was extremely late)
• 3 people were missing self-evals (note: I will not read these until after grades are assigned)

#2 Proposal

838:
    Exemplary = A (very few)
    Good enough = AB
    Minimally Acceptable or Problematic = B (or less)
638:
    Good Enough = A
    Minimally Acceptable = AB
    Problematic = B
   
note: some i gave +/- to, which basically says it might be better/worse than the grade and that should be considered in border cases

#3 Materials

This attempts to assess the quality of the write-up, how nicely things were handed in and presented, … – independently of how good the actual content was. It’s trying to be more about the form, although this is admittedly hard to separate.

638:
    Good (or better than good): A
    Good enough / acceptable : AB
    Problematic: B (or worse)
838:
    Very Good: A
    Acceptable / Good Enough: AB
    Problematic: B (or worse)

#4 Content

Hopefully, the detailed comments (from the P1 feedback) are sufficient to let you know why I gave it the score that I did. Remember, things are scored against the expectations set in the proposal (also described in the initial feedback).

Initial P1 Feedback:

The above scores were built on the P1 feedback.

Please be aware that these may come across as negative – I often was finding flaws, rather than praising the good parts on this pass. Also, in terms of grades, a portion of the grade comes from correctly following the process, and most people do well on that aspect.

Wow – we’re getting to the end. Hopefully, your projects are going well (and you sent a project update), and that will be the main focus of your time. But we do have some topics left…

• Monday, April 30: A lecture of Design. We will have an special guest lecture and interactive activity with someone who has experience as a designer. Please do the reading before the lecture, but you can do the Piazza post afterwards.
• Wednesday, May 2: We’ll combine the previous two lectures and have a discussion on talk materials (using our developing design critique skills to look at some presentations). We will also do course evals.
• Friday, May 4: No class. I will hold extra office hours to discuss projects. There will be a project update due, but details have not yet been provided.

The last week, we’ll talk about 3D and depth perception, and the “other half” of visualization (traditional scientific visualization). But mainly its time for you to get your projects done.