Syllabus and Grading FAQ#

How much does activity x weigh in my grade?#

There is no specific weight for any activities, because your grade is based on earning the badges. Everything at a level must be complete and correct.

How do I keep track of my earned badges?#

You will have several options. You will have a project board that you can track assigned work, in progress work and earned badges with in one place. This is quite different than checking your grade in BrightSpace, but using tools like this represents the real tools used by developers.

You will be able to use provided command line tools and github actions to produce a report of your status at any time from your PR list, starting in the third week. Additionally, at particular points in the course, an in class or class preparation activity will be for you to review a “progress report” that we help you create and update your success plan for the course.

Also, when are each badge due, time wise?#

Review and practice must start within a week, but I recommend starting before the next class. Must be a good faith completion within 2 weeks, but again recommend finishing sooner.

Experience reports for missing class is on a case by case basis depending on why you missed class. You must have a plan by the next class.

Explore and build, we’ll agree to a deadline when you propose.

Who should I request to review my work?#

  • Experience badge (inclass): TA in your group

  • Experience report(makeup) `@brownsarahm``

  • Review badge: @instructors team (it will convert to one of the three of us)

  • Explore Proposal: @brownsarahm

  • Explore Badge: @brownsarahm

  • Build Proposal: @brownsarahm

  • Build Badge: @brownsarahm

Will everything done in the penalty free zone be approved even if there are mistakes?#

No. In the penalty-free zone I still want you to learn things, but we will do extra work to make sure that you get credit for all of your effort even if you make mistakes in how to use GitHub. We will ask you to fix things that we have taught you to fix, but not things that we will not cover until later.

The goal is to make things more fair while you get used to GitHub. It’s a nontrivial thing to learn, but getting used to it is worth it.

I want this class to be a safe place for you to try things, make mistakes and learn from them without penalty. A job is a much higher stakes place to learn a tool as hard as GitHub, so I want this to be lower stakes, even though I cannot promise it will be easy.

Once we make revisions on a pull request, how do we notify you that we have done them?#

You do not have to do anything, GitHub will automatically notify which ever one of us who reviewed it initially when you make changes.

What should work for an explore badge look like and where do I put it?#

It should be a tutorial or blog style piece of writing, likely with code excerpts or screenshots embedded in it.

an example that uses mostly screenshots

an example of heavily annotated code

They should be markdown files in your KWL repo. I recommend myst markdown.