Team Formation Details for MPCS 51205

Each iteration will deliver an incremental accretion of work toward the final project deliverable.  Some assignments will require you to work individually and each team member will submit his or her deliverable, and other assignments will require you to work as a team and submit a single team deliverable.  Generally (see specifics within each Iteration), each student will be responsible for delivering some piece of the work (documentation, code, etc.).  You will be evaluated on the clarity and depth of your analysis of these and other deliverables.  "Deep Thinking" as well as "Shallow Thinking" are generally obvious.  Deep Thinking requires time and....thought.

Unless use of a tool is specified, you may take pictures of whiteboards, papers, napkins, etc. as submission artifacts.  From a remote collaborative design perspective, previous teams have happily leveraged free tools including excalidraw.com, which allows for collaborative brainstorming among remote team members.  However, some artifact deliverables will need to be in the form of formal models.  When a formal artifact is required, it will be so specified.

See the syllabus for information on grading.  Turning in Iteration assignments is required.  Submit your assignments as a tarball to the repository according to the directions on each Iteration page.

Initial Iteration   Due: 5:00 pm, Monday, October 9, 2023

Deliverable One:  Team Membership & Name

This first week you have one assignment.  You are to form a team with other students in the class.  Each team should have five students.  A team may have four students if we do not have our max enrollment of 25 (five teams of 5).  Reach out to other students (use Ed to do this) and work with the TAs to make sure you are on a team by October 9, 2023.  Note that teams  will be required to present their final project on December 4, 2023.  If you are a graduating student, you should seek out other graduating students to form your team.  Students may feel free to propose a new team on Ed to other students inviting them to join your team.  In your invitation, you should specify the target programming language for the team (eg. java, python, etc.).  Teams will be approved and finalized by the teaching staff.

Once your team of three to four students is formed, choose one of your teammates to send an email to Professor Shacklette, cc'ing all TAs and Graders with (a) a preliminary list of your team members.  NO team may have more than 5 students.  Each team is required to create a name and communicate that name in the team formation google sheet.  The name can be anything you choose, but you have to decide on one.  In the past, teams have chosen names such as:  Cubs, Cubbies, White Sox, DaBears, RootinTootinTexans, etc.  Feel free to be creative.

In the event that certain students add or drop, the initial composition of a given team may change.  Nonetheless, teams need to be formed by week two.

Grading of this Assignment:  All students who are named on a team on October 9 will receive full credit for this iteration.  Any student who is on the roster at the beginning of the course who is not on a team by October 9 will receive a 0 for this iteration.

 Submission:

We will be using a repository for each submission. We have provided invitation URLs on Ed Discussion that you will use to request your lab repository. Use the GitHub classroom invitation link for "IterationN" [for N=1,2,3,4] to create your assignment repository. See the Ed post for more info about submission using GitHub classroom. Upload your IterationN files and any supporting materials to the repo. Please include a README text file that contains any instructions or additional details for the TAs to assist with grading.

When you open the invitation URL in a browser tab, you will have to complete the following steps:

Github may ask you to grant permission for GitHub Classroom to have access to your GitHub account. If you are asked this question, you should say yes and grant access to Github Classroom.

You must click “Accept this assignment” or your repository will not actually be created. Do not skip this step!

If you run into any issues, please ask for help.