Grading

The grading scale expected to be used is

A > 90% > B > 80% > C > 70% > D > 60% > F.

The instructor reserves the right to provide a relative or absolute curve to any assignment's grade (note that such a curve has often not been applied, and should not be assumed).

Late Assignments: Each project will have a specified date and time when intermediate and final deliverables are due. If deliverables are turned in late, this may result in a penalty applied to the overall project grade. Expect to lose up to 1% per day.

Course Meetings, Participation, Make-ups

Attendance is required. It may be recorded. Class participation, for which attendance is necessary, but not sufficient, constitutes 10% of the course grade. To get credit for attendance and participation, you must bring a big, bold, printed name tag (like this) to every lecture and lab.

Your participation grade will be based on how you thoughtfully participate, in each class meeting, in discussions about the readings and assignments. Be prepared! The blog post assignment is designed to prepare you to participate in class. I encourage you to perform your own version of this assignment for every meeting of this class and for other classes. Once per week is generally required.

Students seeking excused absences must notify the teaching team ahead of time about any planned missed classes. Unexcused absences may result in a lower course grade.

Absent students might miss quizzes, which may be given any time without notice. Quizzes will not be made up without prior approval of excused absence.

In accord with TAMU Student Rule 7, students with excused absences will be provided with a satisfactory alternative to missed classwork. The makeup assignment for attendance, quizzes and class participation, for each class session missed, is to perform an extra blog post.

A final exam time is reserved for this class [Monday Dec. 12, 1-3 pm]. It will be used for final project presentations. We want all students in the course to see all the presentations. Since that is not enough time for all the presentations, we will additionally meet Monday Dec. 12, 6-8 p.m.

Communication

A Piazza Course Page will be used as an essential medium of communication for updates about the curriculum, including assignments, as well as for students to share questions, solutions, and ideas. You are required to be registered to participate in this Piazza online community, to receive emails about activity therein. You are required to check your email daily for notification of community communication, and to promptly follow-up all notifications through the Piazza website and this course website.

Readings

The field of human-centered computing is non-linear, characterized by how it connects and synthesizes contributions from diverse fields, including computer science, cognitive and social psychology, sociology, design, and art. This is necessary for understanding users and building computing systems for them.

While a few are from an HCI textbook, most of the readings are primary source materials, including HCI research articles and field-specific texts. In assembling this material, for yourself, it is crucial to understand: who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? Make sure to find out the background of each author. Form an intellectual map of the players in the field. Bonus: if you perform HCI research, you will meet some of them. It will be quite useful and important to remember then who they are, and what they said that was interesting.

Iterative Design [assignments]

The same way that the course requires you to engage in iterative design, I, myself, as your professor, am engaged in a continuous iterative design process of curricula, including the curriculum for this course. This means:

• I will sometimes revise assignment specifications and lecture as I present them. This not because I am unprepared—I work extremely hard to prepare—but rather, that as I present in the situated context of the classroom, I am periodically inspired to understand how to better explain material. It is impossible for me to take advantage of these realizations unless I incorporate them on the spot.
• I will review and revise assignment specifications the night before I present them in class. I will review reading specifications each week. In this way, I keep the material alive, by continuously working to better understand it in relationship to your needs. Thus, CAVEAT: while I make specifications available in advance, you must understand that there may be some revisions. The advance specifications are to give you a sense of what is coming, but they may not exactly represent the actual assignment.
• Once an assignment is given, its essence will not change. I may still add clarification to specifications, in case I detect ambiguity in practice.

Honor Code

An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.

Upon accepting admission to Texas A&M University, a student immediately assumes a commitment to uphold the Honor Code, to accept responsibility for learning, and to follow the philosophy and rules of the Honor System. Students will be required to state their commitment on examinations, research papers, and other academic work. Ignorance of the rules does not exclude any member of the TAMU community from the requirements or the processes of the Honor System.

For additional information, visit: http://student-rules.tamu.edu/aggiecode

For this class, certain aspects of the honor code need to be clarified.

1. There may be times in this course where you or your team make use of external code/software/libraries. Whenever this is done, you must make sure that, in addition to following any restrictions on that code itself, you clearly document what the source of the external code was, and how it was used.
2. There may be cases in this course where you or your team seeks outside assistance related to one of the projects. You must document, in writing, any assistance received from people other than members of your team, the professor, teaching assistants, or peer teachers.
3. You will be working in team environments in this course, and your work as a team will be used to determine grades. As such, it is your responsibility, when asked, to:

• accurately describe the work that you have done on a team project. Claiming credit for work that you have not done or that others did instead is a violation of the code.
• accurately describe (to the best of your knowledge) the performance of other team members. "Covering" for another team member (claiming they did more work than you know they did) or "spiking" them (claiming they did less work than you know they did) are examples of honor code violations.
• prevent (as best you can) or report (known) violations of the honor code by your other team members. You share responsibility when a project is turned in; if you are aware of a teammate having violated the code in his/her work on the project, and do not report it, you are claiming credit for that violation yourself.

If there are any questions or concerns about whether an action is appropriate, check with the professor or teaching assistant first. If in doubt, assume that it is not appropriate.

Students with Disabilities

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities.

If you believe you have a disability that would benefit from support, please contact Disability Services, currently located in the Disability Services building at the Student Services at White Creek complex on west campus or call 979-845-1637. Access resources at http://disability.tamu.edu.