Your total grade for the semester is divided into the following sections.
Participation | 10% |
40 Blogs | 20% |
Paper Presentation | 3% |
25 Quizzes | 12% |
Project 1 - Ethnography | 14% |
Project 2 - Ethnography Design | 4% |
Project 3 - Haptigo | 12% |
Final Project | 15% |
Exams | 10% |
TOTAL | 100% |
A | 90% and above |
B | 75% to 90% |
C | 60% to 75% |
D | 50% to 60% |
F | below 50% |
You need to complete IRB training before you can do any of the assignments. Until your IRB is completed, your assignments are considered late and not submitted.
Attendance Policy: 100%
Attendance is vital for class discussion. If you miss too many classes, you are bound to fail your quiz and your participation component, as well as do poorly in the other components (check out the math). To make clear the importance of attendance, students are permitted a maximum of 5 absences before they automatically fail the course.
Participation: 10%
Discussion is an important part of the classroom content and it both crucial that you attend the discussions as well as participate in them. Insightful questions and comments are encouraged. As such, we have a classroom rubric that rewards students who participate insightfully. 10% of your grade will be composed of your classroom participation. Participation will be graded on a 30 point scale. For every thoughtful comment, question, or response, you will get one point for that day. You can get a maximum of 3 points per day. Additionally for each n’th day that you are absent you will get a minus number of n points. The maximum number of points receivable are 30 points.
Here are a number of ways for you to reach the 30 points max. There are 29 days in the semester, thus there are a total of 87 points for the taking:
- Respond to 4 questions each day, get 3 points each day for a total of max(30, 4*29) = max(30,116) = 30 points
- Respond to 3 questions each day, get 3 points each day for a total of max(30, 3*29) = max(30, 87) = 30 points
- Respond to 2 questions each day, get 2 points each day for a total of max(30, 2*29) = max(30, 58) = 30 points
- Respond to 1 question each day, and two one day for a total of max(30, 1*28 + 2*1) = 30
- Respond to 2 questions each day, but absent 5 times for a total of max(30, 2*24 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5)= max(30, 48 - 15) = max(30, 33) = 30 points
Absence Effect on Max Participation Points:
- 1st absence = -1 point (with one absence, max participation points = 83)
- 2nd absence = -2 point (with two absence, max participation points = 78)
- 3rd absence = -3 point (with three absence, max participation points = 72)
- 4th absence = -4 points (with four absence, max participation points = 65)
- 5th absence = -5 points (with five absences, max participation points = 57)
- 6th absence = Fail course due to attendance policy.
There will be two exams, one midterm and another final exam. Each will be worth 5% of your grade.
25 Quizzes: 12%
Several studies have shown that the act of testing improves the comprehension of material more than studying alone. In fact, studies have shown that you learn more from two study sessions followed by two quiz sessions than you do by four study sessions! Additionally, class discussions are much more insightful when students have prepared for class. As such, there will be daily quizzes on the reading material due for that day. Each quiz will have 10 questions. There will be 25 quizzes. Your lowest quiz grade will be dropped so that only 24 quizzes will count towards your grade. Each quiz is thus worth 0.5% of your grade.
Presentation Grade: 3%
Verbal communications skills are as important as written communication skills. You will have to present one paper to the class. You will need to pick your paper and date on the first day. Because everyone has read your paper, and there are only exactly the same number of papers as there are people in the class, if you don't show up and you can't convince someone to switch with you, you get a 0. You can't make up these points. If an emergency occurs, you need to convince someone to switch with you, or take the loss of these three points since it effects the class as a whole.
We will use the following rubric for grading the presentations:
Oral Presentation Rubric
- Each presentation will be worth 16 points:
- 4 points for delivery,
- 4 points for strength of material, organization
- 8 points for awareness of audience
Blogs are important for several reasons:
- They help improve your writing skills.
- They get you in the practice of writing and taking good notes about what you read.
- The summary/discussion format is very useful for taking notes on papers in graduate school.
- Your blogs will be helpful when you are writing papers, rather than re-read the papers, you can just read the blog since everything you will need is there.
- They help ensure that you have read the paper effectively.
50% of your blog grade will go towards your paper review blogs, and 50% will be on other readings and classroom activities. There will be 40 UIST/IUI/CHI papers to blog on. One for each student in the class to present. The grading policy for the blog posts have been provided here (Guide #1: Writing your blog post).
Ethnography (14%)
Student will group together to perform an ethnography of 10 weeks. Each student is expected to participate an average of four hours a week each person in the group. Each student is also expected to take notes and spend one hour hour a week writing up the results of the ethnography. You can write you notes up as a group or individual, but the total notes and time spent are expected to be the sum of the number of people in the group. For example if there are four people in the group, that is 16 hours of ethnography time plus four hours of write up per week. A list of suggested topics have been provided here.
Ethnography Design Project (4%)
Design a digital artifact that would aid of the lives of the group of people you are studying in your ethnography. Make sure you have plenty of mock - ups for the designed application. Your project report should follow the paper writing guide. The deliverables for this project are a report, and a video.
Haptigo (12%)
Haptic feedback is a mode of providing information through touch. Wearable fabrics can be effective for communicating with the environment around you. This project has two parts in it: one that is pre-defined, and one that is defined by you. In the predefined part of the project, you are to direct a person through a maze using only tactile directional feedback. You will use wearable Arduino / LilyPad chips that are physically connected to vibro-actuators that are sewn (by you) into clothing, and connect through Bluetooth to an Android phone for controlling it. In the second part of the project, you can use haptic feedback in your own creative way.
Final Project (15%)
Implement and test a CHI artifact. We encourage using designs from Project 2 or Project 3. The project group may also propose a new topic instead. Projects are expected to have the following:
- Written Report:
- Motivation - Sufficient motivation for developing the project
- Related Work - full coverage the previous work
- Implementation - complete demo - able implementation of the project
- Evaluation - a mature evaluation of the system developed
- Results and Discussion - a sophisticated discussion about the results obtained from the evaluation.
- Future Work
- Make a video demo of the project in a graphically pleasing and enjoyable format. An example for a video demonstration - MultimodalRummy link .
- The video will be presented on Day 29, December 12 1:00 PM and will serve as project presentation.
