427 assessment

Latest revision as of 03:18, 25 November 2010

WarwickIrwin.

Assessment for Cosc427

The assessment for COSC427 consists of

• Contributions to the wiki, including design study: 50%.
• A final exam: 50%.

As noted in Teaching and learning style, participation is a vital ingredient of this course.

The wiki acts as a record of written contributions. Whenever you make a non-trivial contribution to a wiki page, you should Sign your work on the discussion page.

You will also be asked to make specific contributions to the wiki, and to present your work to the class. This work will also contribute to your grade.

Dates

• Design study: First submission 1st August for 0%. Final submission 1st Oct.
• Wiki contribution assessment: Same time as exam?.
• Exam(updated): 3-5pm Thursday 21 October in lab 4.

Design study

Worth 40%. That makes the general wiki contribution assessment worth 10%.

The design study is to be done individually.

Design Project: create an elegant object-oriented software design.

The design should be:-

• documented in terms of the OOD concepts addressed by Cosc427.
• implemented as working code.

The size of your design project is not formally limited, but the intent is to keep it small. The goal is to make something rich and beautiful, rather than big. (An example of a small but rich design is the JUnit UnitTesting framework of Erich Gamma and Kent Beck.) You will be assessed for the quality (not size) of the design and the conciseness and clarity with which it is explained.

Your design project can be part of some larger work, such as open source software, a program for another class, or an honours project. The project must be object-oriented, of course. If you don't have a suitable project of your own, someone may be happy to "lend" you their code in exchange for a copy of your design submission. If you have difficulty finding a suitable body of code, I can provide some.

Your submission should take the form of a wiki page (and attachments), so that it can be exhibited and copied with the wiki. Just like architects produce models of buildings and put them on display, we will showcase your designs to other members of the class, the department, and perhaps the wider OOD community.

No secrets

In the spirit of this course and the interests of better learning, you should document your assignment progress on the wiki -- make a link from your homepage. All 427 participants are welcome to provide constructive feedback on anyone's work.

Marking

The assignment will be marked by Wal.

Marking will evaluate:

• The quality of the design.
• The quality with which the design is communicated.

Your document should:

• Be concise, simple, and written so everyone in 427 can understand it.
• Make clear what is attributable to your 427 work, and what already existed at the start of this assignment.
• Explain your design and the reasoning behind it, emphasising concepts covered in 427.
• Show the finished design, by leading the reader through a series of bite-sized increments that make the concepts and issues clear.
• Not record a chronological log of your progress. That's a good thing to do in a progress log, but the assessment is of your final product.

Assignment questions.

Project ideas

We have a page for Project ideas. Go there to:

• Get ideas for design topics.
• See others' topics.
• Describe your own topic.

Submission

Put your assignment on the wiki, on or linked from your homepage. The whole wiki will be automatically copied at submission time.

Instructions:

• Your assignment should be written as a wiki page andattachment(s) that can be displayed in a web browser (e.g. pdf, jpg, etc). Don't write separate html or other pages outside the wiki. This ensures your assignment is visible to others, and will be copied with the wiki.
• Near the top of your wiki homepage, place a link to your assignment submission. Make it easy to find, please.
• Attach an archive of the source code, using a common format such as zip or tgz.

Exam

See above for time.

Exam questions