Community Engagement

Overview

Up to 10 points of the final grade are earned through collaboration with your peers and general engagement with the course outside of the assignments and project.

Aside from the basic expectation that you’ll attend class and pay attention, this can look different for everyone. The community engagement grade is not about meeting the minimum requirement (e.g., attending class!). It’s about demonstrating a high level of investment in the course and your peers. This is not an attendance grade.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that can contribute to the community engagement grade:

  1. In-classroom:
    • Make active contributions in a large group setting by asking/answering questions during lecture
    • Use workshop time wisely and generously, seeking and offering support from/to classmates with debugging and troubleshooting
    • Participating in group activities
    • Generally paying attention and staying focused during class time
  2. Outside the classroom:
    • Be an active participant on the class Slack channel, both asking and answering questions
    • Get support from classmates, TAs, and the professor
    • Team up with a partner or small group to meet for working groups outside of class
    • Take on one or more of the optional collaborative assignments in the assessment menu
Independent and collaborative problem-solving

A large portion of the course is developing your search skills when it comes to debugging your code (look for advice and solutions from others who have faced similar problems on sites like stackoverflow and github)! Developing this skill and supporting others can be a major component of the community engagement grade. Week 1 slides will include a formal procedure to follow for troubleshooting help.

How do I know if I’m doing well?

If you’re actively participating in class, asking questions, answering questions, and generally engaging with the material and your peers, you’re probably doing great! At the end of the course, your engagement grade will be assigned based on your own self-assessment in a short written reflection. You can do that totally retrospectively, but you can also start keeping track of your own engagement throughout the quarter to make it easier to reflect on later.

Make note of specific examples of how you engaged with the class and your peers, both in and out of the classroom. Posting to Slack? Joining a study group? Coming to office hours? Tackling a more ambitious project than you needed to? Add it to the list of things you did and include that list in your self-assessment. If you can name specific examples of how you participated in the class community, I’ll be able to confidently assign you a high engagement grade.