This quarter we will have three "Unit Portfolio" assessments that are meant to replace the reviewing, summarizing, and reflecting that studying for exams provides. There will be two parts to these portfolios as described below.
The content covered by each Unit Summary is as follows:
Complete the two tasks detailed below. Both tasks must be completed individually, in your own words and work.
Estimated time to complete: A few hours
For this task, you will work on problems similar to those that may have appeared on a traditional CSE 351 exam. However, rather than simply solving and submitting your solutions to the problems, you will create videos to teach someone else how to solve them!
Each unit portfolio will have a problem associated with it. For each problem, you will create a three- to five-minute video walking through your problem-solving approach and explaining your solution. You will not get docked if you go slightly over 5 minutes but try to keep the length within a reasonable bound.
Your videos should include your voice explaining your solution to the problems. Videos must also include some way of showing your work. This could be a screen-recording, whiteboard, tablet, or any other material that works for you. The format is not important; what matters is you are able to effectively explain your approach and show your work. Your videos do not need to include an explanation of the problem itself, but should mention any relevant details. We recommend solving the problems first and then creating the recording.
You will not be graded on the correctness of your solutions nor on your english skills. However, your work must demonstrate a good-faith effort to solve the problems to the best of your ability. If there are aspects you struggle with, you should call those out in your video. Explanations of errors or areas of struggle are very effective teaching tools!
You can use any technology you have available to create your videos. There are no minimum quality requirements, but both the video and audio should be clear enough to understand what you are saying and doing. If you do not have access to technology capable of creating a video that meets the requirements, or if you are in a living situation that makes recording video infeasible, please contact the course staff immediately to make arrangements. The UW Student Technology Loan Program may also be able to help.
Estimated time to complete: 30 minutes
Write 2 paragraphs about why the material from this unit will make you be a better programmer. This course is designed to have something for everyone, whether your goal is to design hardware or just use it. One of the goals of this course is to make you a more effective programmer. Take some time to think about the material from this unit from the perspective of a programmer. What are some very concrete take away concepts and skills learned in this unit that you will be able to put into action as you continue programming? Some of these things may be very specific to the C language, but others are more general and apply to other languages as well.
Answers should not be of the form - "Now I understand floating point format" but instead describe HOW understanding floating point format will make you a more effective programmer. What will you do differently now in your programming than you did before? Make sure to include some specific examples.
You are limited to approximately half of a single side of an 8.5" x 11" page (in pdf format), assuming standard 12pt font size with single spaced lines. Fonts should be no smaller than 10pt. A handwritten and scanned or digital ink version is also fine as long as it is readable.
Unit Summaries will be submitted via . Make sure to submit both the video and the reflection pdf. You may either upload the video directly to the Canvas assignment or you can upload it on a video hosting platform and provide a URL link to the video. If you provide a link, make sure the permissions are set so that we can access it.
Each task will be graded seperately and weighted equally. They will use the following grading scale:
We expect that most people who complete both tasks with genuine effort will receive the grade of S for "Satisfactory". More concretely, to earn a grade of S for the video portion we expect your submission to meet the following requirements:
For the reflection portion, we have provided an example of a good summary and a not so good summary. These examples are only on one topic, LinkedLists, which are not covered in this course, but should provide guidance as to what we are looking for in this task. Note how the good example concretely references ways this topic will make them a better programmer where as the not so good example only vaguely states that they will be a better programmer now.