Introduction
This section is a practice library: a collection of well-crafted exercises you can run with your team or on your own. They exist to help you execute your project well and to prepare you for the graded assignments, which say what’s due and when.
The activities are organized by the kind of work:
- Team and Workflow: team formation, working and conflict styles, the board, stand-ups, team health.
- Planning and Risk: approvals, stakeholders, risks, dependencies.
- Requirements: canvases, hypotheses, personas, user stories, prioritization, success metrics.
- Working with Users: interview questions, finding and engaging users, UX maturity.
- Ideation: brainstorming, SCAMPER, design sprints.
- Research Methods: literature reviews, research questions, data, baselines, experiment logs.
- Technical Design: technology choices, architecture, schemas, security, design review.
- Interaction Design and Accessibility: prototypes, UI guidelines, game design, accessibility.
- Testing, Release, and Handoff: test plans, safety nets, deployment, releases, maintenance, documentation.
- Presenting: talks, stage fright, external feedback.
- Learning and Reflection: learning journals, reading, watching, listening.
- Career: resumes, portfolios, interviews, networking.
Reading the Badge Line
Section titled “Reading the Badge Line”Under most activities’ headings, a line of badges says how long the activity takes, whether everyone does it, and which assignments it helps with. Beyond the nine workshops, the handbook holds more than a hundred activities that can help your project without being tied to required class work.
- Whole team
- Only works with everyone there. Schedule it when the whole team can attend.
- Effort: 1 to 2 h
- Time for one run, from 15 minutes to ongoing.
- Workshop 1, Fall
- Everyone runs it in class. The badge links the workshop’s entry, which lists what to submit.
- Helps withTeam Charter
- The cheapest route to a criterion on that assignment. The badge links the section naming which one.
Not Every Project Needs the Same Preparation
Section titled “Not Every Project Needs the Same Preparation”Projects don’t need the same preparation: one starts in an existing codebase, one contributes to an open-source project, one waits on a partner’s data or IT review, and most hit more than one of these. Several assignment pages carry an Examples table naming the activities a project in a given situation usually needs, alongside the ones everybody does. A project may match several rows or none; if none fits, ask your partner or mentor which activities do.
If your project waits on access, data, or a review from someone outside the team, start Map Your External Approvals as early as you can. For example, before a hospital or another university sends you data, you and that institution sign a data use agreement. If someone else has to reproduce your result, Reproduce Your Baseline, Make Your Artifact Reproducible, and Keep an Experiment Log are worth knowing about from the start.
How to Use This Library
Section titled “How to Use This Library”Work from the rubric rather than the whole list: read the rubric for what’s due next, do the activities its assignment page names, and leave the rest until you need them. Every activity ends with what a good output looks like, and those with an effort badge let you judge the investment before starting.
Do the nine workshop activities regardless, because they’re the ones that pay off more than once.
You’re encouraged to email the instruction team for early feedback on your progress.