Final Project: Digital Humanities

Overview

There will be a final project in this course which accounts for 10% of the overall course grade and which will be completed during the last month of the course, after both of the major programming assignments have wrapped up. In particular, students will work in groups of size 1 to 3 to create some project related to the digital humanities. More details to follow...

Objectives

Students will learn to scope out and follow through on a medium sized, open ended project.
Students will learn how to apply technical knowledge in a creative, artistic application.
Students will learn how to give and receive constructive feedback in a professional setting.

One of the biggest challenges will be to appropriately scope out your project under the time constraints. You want to have enough done that someone can explore your prototype and determine whether the concept "works." But you don't want to over-engineer and get stuck without something that runs. Please see these excellent videos on appropriately scoping out video game designs. Many of these ideas transfer to any highly complex project, not just video games.

Documentation

To save time in class, students will be required to make videos summarizing their work. A simple way to do this could be to screencast playing the game, while talking over and explaining how it works. Students may also want to include some slides explaining some of the implementation details further. Once the videos are completed, each student will be randomly assigned 3-4 videos from other groups in the course to watch and for which to provide critical feedback. This feedback will factor into the participation grade.
NOTE: I will of course also be watching each video carefully myself.

Grading Rubric

15%	Check-In Milestones: How well did you meet the small goals we set every two weeks?
50%	Technical refinement: How much did the project mature over the time you worked on it? How close are you to the final goal that you had? Did you meet all of the specifications?
10%	Narrated video: Graded for overall clarity, quality of figures/animations, and demonstration of what you did so that other students can understand it
15%	Code/Documentation/Mini Report: In lieu of a formal final report, you will submit a brief summary of what you accomplished, along with code and directions on how to use it. You can think of this as an extended README. You will be graded on the quality of your code and documentation (how easy is it for someone who doesn't know your project to run your code?).
10%	Above and beyond: How much did you do to refine this project and to make it your own? Did you put any unique twists on it that weren't suggested by the instructor?