Assignment 1: Exploring CS6460 (Fall 2017)

Due: Sunday, August 27th, 2017, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Assignment Instructions

In the Resources folder of T-Square, you’ll find the Past Project Library, an archive of final projects and presentations from previous semesters of this class. You’ll also find a spreadsheet that gives some information to explore the library.

From this Past Project Library, select three projects that you find interesting. Read their papers and/or watch their presentations. Then, briefly write about them: who were the students? What did they do? Why do you find it interesting? What opportunities for further work do you think there might be?

The main goal of this assignment is to help acquaint you with the class and its goals; after all, you’ll finish the class by assembling a paper and presentation just like the ones you see in the library. This project also serves as an introduction to the breadth of the educational technology space: just in browsing the spreadsheet, you’ll see the massive number of different projects and efforts going on within this space.

Your assignment should be approximately 500 words long. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather a heuristic to simply describe the level of depth we would like to see. Feel free to write more, or if you believe you can complete the assignment in fewer words, feel free to write less.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in accordance with the Assignment Submission Instructions. Most importantly, you should submit a single PDF for each assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (either through the class Resources folder or your own upload destination) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on a traditional A-F scale based on the extent to which your deliverable met expectations. If your deliverable receives below an A, you may revise and resubmit it once within two weeks of the original due date or one week of receiving a grade, whichever is later. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

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. You receive 1.5 participation points for completing a peer review by the end of the day Thursday; 1.0 for completing a peer review by the end of the day Sunday; and 0.5 for completing it after Sunday but before the end of the semester. For more details, see the participation policy.