Week Nº 23

Everyone should have received their evaluations on Slack earlier this afternoon. This should also function as a proxy for your mid-term standing in the class⁠—today is the halfway mark, if can believe it! You can, as always, respond to us there with any questions or concerns.

We’d like to remind folks here of our overall grade calculation for the Spring. Your remaining Index and Functions projects are, combined, worth twice as much⁠—and your readings, milestones, and engagement can likewise bolster your scores. So take that into account moving forward!

A couple things we wanted to bring up here, as a group:

• Unconsidered feedback

  There was an overall, noticeable lack of engagement with our prior feedback⁠—both from previous project evaluations (more technical), but also from in-class and Slack notes (more design and behavior).

  We were pretty disappointed by this⁠—our process here is much of the point of this course, and meaningfully incorporating and responding to feedback is central to our design discipline. We expect more here.

• “AI,” again

  From our syllabus:

  We think you first need to write code yourself to understand the medium. Copying/​adapting from Chat⁠GPT/​Copilot is no different from anywhere else and is ultimately a disservice to your education. These are always to be treated like any other tools at our disposal⁠—as aides to your understanding, not shortcuts around learning. We think you know the difference.

  After looking through your project repos, we think we were wrong about the last sentence⁠—it appears to us that many of you do not know the difference.

  We will be revisiting our acceptable LLM use for Project 5⁠—likely landing somewhere between “zero-tolerance” and “heavily restricted.” We’ll share this with you next class, when we return after Spring Break.

  In the meantime, these tools should be nowhere near your planning/​roadmapping milestones. The entire point of these steps are to exercise your abilities!

Before we break out into groups to discuss your proposals, let’s talk through the rest of the project:

Project Nº 5: Functions

We’ll split into two groups to go through your proposals:

Here’s how we’d like to structure this, today:

• We’ll be using the FigJam pages above! Sign in and such as we get settled today, so we are ready to go.

• Then add three (or more) sticky notes to your section, one note for each of your problems/​proposals.

• You can copy/​paste from your Google Doc, but only write titles/​short descriptions⁠—just enough to differentiate them!

• We’ll be using these for dot voting⁠—a way to gather overall popularity and help in your decision-making.

• We both want to hear everyone’s proposals, which means we’ll have only a few minutes with you each.

• Very briefly introduce us to each of your three problems, in a minute or two⁠—stay “high level!”

• We will both have three “votes,” which we will assign/​distribute to your problems based on feasibility and “overall vibes” and such.

• After we place our votes, the rest of the group will place theirs⁠—use the stamp tool with your avatar for your dots.

• You can likewise distribute these as you see fit⁠—all on one project, spread across, however you feel.

• At the end, everyone should have… 33 dots/​votes in their section!

This will help give you an idea of what is resonating with us and your classmates⁠—the goal here being to help you narrow down to one of your problems.

• If you’re feeling any big, directional swings after today and want our feedback after revising/​narrowing⁠—we need to know in the next couple days! There is really no time to burn, here.

• You’ll be refining your concept, roughing out your features, prioritization, and planning for the next six weeks:

  Project Nº 5: Project Roadmap

• As we note over there, your roadmap should also include what you are working on for when we next meet⁠—beyond just the roadmap itself. You will need to make other progress, starting into your actual features/​tasks. Identify the MVP and work back from there!

• We will also be checking in on your Index project milestone/​progress, which we discussed last week:

  Project Index: Adding Context and Form

• Make sure we have a link to your roadmap, a quick update on your progress, and your Index URL:

  Submission Form