Final Project (Fall 2015)
Due: Saturday, December 5th, 2015, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth) (all parts).
Your final deliverable will have three pieces: the project itself, a presentation, and a paper.
The Project Itself
Your actual project submission should be a cataloged .zip file with the work you completed during the semester. Include in root of your .zip file a Catalog.pdf/.docx/etc. file that describes the contents of the archive.
The contents of the archive will vary based on the nature of your project. If you created a tool, you should submit the code for the tool. If the tool is runnable locally, you should include the executable. If your tool runs on a server, you should include a link to a working version of the tool. You should also submit any design documents, documentation, or anything else proposed in your project proposal.
If you performed some research, you should submit all the materials used to conduct the research: consent forms, interview scripts, surveys, etc. You should also submit the data itself that was gathered, as well as the results of any analysis and any research design documentation you assembled to prepare for the work.
If you have any doubt about what you should submit, talk to your mentor before submitting.
Submission Instructions
Please submit your assignment as a .zip file via T-Square. You can find the assignment submission page by going to T-Square, clicking CS6460, clicking Assignments, and then clicking the assignment title. Resubmission is allowed any number of times up to the due date.
If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit this assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting it, however.
Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.
Grading Information
Your assignment will be evaluated on the extent to which you delivered on the project you proposed earlier in the semester: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations. Because this is due at the end of the semester, there is no opportunity for resubmission if your project falls short; however, the weekly status checks are intended to help us note if expectations need to change, and that will be taken into consideration on the final project deliverable.
The Project Presentation
In addition to the project itself, you’ll also put together a short end-of-class presentation on your work in the course. This is the equivalent of the presentations we would do at the end of this course on-campus, where students and teams would take turns presenting their work to the rest of the class.
Like the trailer, your final presentation could be a video of you presenting your project in person, a screen capture with audio of you walking through and demonstrating your tool or showing off your analysis, or any other kind of video presentation. You’re also welcome to make your presentation interactive. If your tool is available on the internet, or if it can be downloaded and run locally, then you’re welcome to include student interaction as part of your presentation. Your presentation should still be more than simply providing the tool (for example, there could be a script of things the viewer should do to experience the tool as part of your video presentation), but including interactive elements is great.
The primary goal of this assignment is to show off what you’ve worked on to your classmates and mentor. If you consent to this, your project presentation will also be added to our course library so that future students in the class can see what you worked on and draw inspiration from it. Who knows: maybe a future team will even come to you asking if they can build on your work.
Submission Instructions
Please submit a PDF with a link to your video for the assignment (to make it easily importable to Peer Feedback). You’re welcome to upload your video to YouTube or another video sharing site if you’re comfortable uploading it to an external host. If you do not wish to do so, you may upload your video to the Resources folder in T-Square, and then submit a link to the video within T-Square as your submission. Please feel free to submit your video that way if you would prefer not to host it publicly.
If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit this assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting it, however.
Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.
Grading Information
Your assignment will be evaluated on the extent to which it follows the directions and achieves the learning goal on a simple rubric: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations. Because this is due at the end of the semester, there is no opportunity for resubmission if your presentation falls short. However, your presentation will be graded solely based on the presentation itself; weaknesses in the project will not be held against the presentation.
Peer Review
After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your mentor and classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas. All grades will come from the graders alone.
You will typically be assigned four classmates to review. Peer reviews are due one week after the due date of the assignment, and count towards your participation grade.
The Project Paper
Finally, you will also submit a paper on your project. The primary intention of this paper is to allow for an easy transition to continuing with your project after the semester is over. You’ll choose the conference or journal most applicable to your work and write a paper in the format required for submission to that venue. You are not required to submit the paper to the conference or journal, of course, but the goal is to make it as straightforward as possible for you to experience the next step.
In writing your paper, we recommend reviewing some of the papers published in that conference or journal in the past as well. This will help you understand the general priorities of that venue. Do they expect rigorous statistical analysis, or are they more design- and idea-oriented? Are they more interested in the design of the user interaction, or in the design of the tool under the hood? Do they prefer qualitative or quantitative methods? You can also use this review process to choose the venue most appropriate for your work.
Note that journal articles are most often longer and reserved for more mature work; I would expect that most people will be much closer to conference papers by the end of the semester. Note also that while you should write in the format for your desired venue, you are welcome to take some liberties with the content of the paper, even if it distances your paper a bit from what the conference would like to see. For example, if you’re more interested in the start-up route than the research and academia route, then you may want the content to be more reminiscent of a business plan than a research paper. That’s completely fine!
The primary goal of this assignment is to set you up to take the next step with your project, whether that be submitting it for publication, seeking research funding to continue work, or soliciting investors to turn it into a start-up business. A secondary goal is to give you a more thorough medium to share your work; as with the project presentations, with your permission, we’ll add your paper to the course library for future students to view.
Submission Instructions
Please submit your assignment as a .pdf, .docx, or other common document file via T-Square. You can find the assignment submission page by going to T-Square, clicking CS6460, clicking Assignments, and then clicking the assignment title. Resubmission is allowed any number of times up to the due date.
If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit this assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting it, however.
Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.
Grading Information
Your assignment will be evaluated on the extent to which it follows the directions and achieves the learning goal on a simple rubric: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations. Because this is due at the end of the semester, there is no opportunity for resubmission if your presentation falls short. However, your presentation will be graded solely based on the presentation itself; weaknesses in the project will not be held against the presentation.