Intermediate Milestones (Spring 2016)

Due: Four separate milestones, due March 6th, March 20th, April 3rd, and April 17th, each by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Assignment Instructions

As part of your proposal process, you will construct four milestones that you will deliver while completing your project. These milestones should be in service of the overall project, but should also be chances to show your work off to your classmates and mentor. The primary functions of these milestones are to (a) demonstrate to your mentor the work you have accomplished, and (b) provide your mentor and classmates the material necessary to receive feedback on your progress so far. These milestones may also accomplish other goals, like receiving feedback from beta testers, recruiting experimental subjects, or publicizing your work to a greater audience.

Total, your four intermediate milestones are expected to take approximately six hours to prepare. However, you are welcome to distribute these six hours unevenly among the milestones. You could, for instance, have one very significant milestone (e.g. a polished video trailer) and three more simple milestones (e.g. simple descriptions of the work completed and questions for feedback). During the proposal process, your mentor will observe and approve your proposed milestones to ensure the right amount of work is proposed overall.

Below are some ideas for intermediate milestones to include in your proposal. You are welcome to propose your own ideas:

  • Progress Reports. A description of the work that has been completed, along with open questions. (We expect almost everyone will have one or two of these as intermediate milestones.)
  • Trailers. A short, entertaining video “advertising” your project. Have fun with it!
  • Presentations. A video demonstrating your project’s current status, explaining the rationale, the design, etc. This may be tailored to the state of your project at the time of the milestone — for example, a presentation for Milestone 1 might involve describing the plan for addressing the problem, while for Milestone 4 it might be a presentation of a working version of the tool.
  • Functional Prototypes. If you’re building a piece of software, a working demo that your classmates can actually use.
  • Low-Fidelity Prototypes. If you’re building a piece of software, screen mock-ups and other prototypes of the ultimate design.
  • Final Project Drafts. For the final milestone, you may simply want to submit your current draft of the final project, your presentation, or your paper to get earlier feedback.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding Milestone assignment on T-Square 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 describes how to access the assignment.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, 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

As with all assignments in this class, each milestone 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. Due to T-Square restrictions, your grade will be provided on a 5-point scale: a ‘5’ is an A, a ‘4’ is a B, a ‘3’ is a C, a ‘2’ is a D, a ‘1’ is an F, and a ‘0’ is a failure-to-submit.