Your grade is largely determined by performance
in three areas: in class activities, a final exam, and the course project.
Exams: 15%
There will be one final exam, worth 15% of your grade.
Activities: 55%
There will be eleven activities, two per week. These activities are each graded by a short quiz given at the start of the class period, and by your individual contribution to the class discussion.
Note that activities can not be made up. If you miss a class activity, you get a zero for that part of your grade. Coming in late, after the quiz has been given, will result in a zero on the quiz!
I think it is important to get a generous amount of active practice than to get detailed feedback on everything you produce. Normally, all students are encouraged to speak during class on the day that activities occur.
Course project documents: 30%
During the first week of class you will be assigned to a project group. Throughout the semester the groups will carry out a development project to model and practice the techniques of scenario-based usability engineering. The project report is deliverable in 5 pieces: a requirements analysis (with scenarios and claims), activity design and information design (with scenarios and claims), interaction design (with prototypes), a usability evaluation (with oral report), and a final project report.
Each of these documents is worth 6% of your grade.
By default, all members of a project team receive the same grade. As most of you know, this work arrangement sometimes leads to interpersonal challenges, as it does in the 'real' world of software development. Managing, and learning from, these challenges is part of the activity. If unbearable problems develop, and you find that you just cannot manage them, they should be brought to me. I should warn you however that I will deal with problems at this magnitude seriously.
Class participation
On many of our class meetings we will carry out in-class activities to practice concepts and skills. Just showing up (on time) and participating seriously in the activities is worth 1 class participation point. The other part of your grade will come from a quiz. We will be checking to see whether people contribute on these activity days.
During the semester, there may be oppotunities to serve as an experimental subject in human-computer interaction research being carried out by students and faculty in the Computer Science department. Serving as an experimental subject (these sessions generally run about 20-50 minutes) is worth a small amount of extra credit. Note that I cannot guarantee that there will be any experiments to participate in, I only know that some are planned.