(Week: 3) G: Milestone 0: Problem Blurb, First-Person Research & Draft Consent Form

Last revised date: 9/28/2026

View / submit on Canvas

Overview

Early check-in — post your problem statement, first-person research links, and a draft (blank) consent form to your project site.

Assignment Details

Key: pink boxes happen in Canvas, blue boxes in your project repo, green boxes on your project’s public site.

Key: pink is Canvas, blue is your project repo, green is your project public site.

Flowchart of the Milestone 0 tasks. A text version follows the image.

Text version of this diagram
  • Start: familiarize yourself with Github. Then do four things in parallel:
  • Write the project overview (public site).
  • Individually, complete the first-person accounts assignment (Canvas), then add a summary to public/user-need.html (public site).
  • Draft a blank consent form in CONSENT.md (repo).
  • Log contributions in LOG.md#build (repo).
  • All four lead to the last step: tag your repo and submit to Canvas (Canvas).

Familiarize yourself with GIT

The git features you will need to understand to complete this assignment include the following. each team member will need to learn these.

Start your running project doc

Your project has an assigned github repository which will hold a living summary of your project. We set up a (public) hosted website in it, which should have project documentation, and if feasible a running version of your project (you can replace what we did with something more complex if you want, if github pages is a viable way to deploy).

We will build the public documentation up incrementally (an example can be found in the Sample repository. You will turn in different pages for each milestone, and have the opportunity to update prior material as well.

Milestone 0 requires you to edit the following:

Overall project goals (public/index.html#overview)

As a team, write a brief paragraph about overall project goals. You can reuse this from your project pitch. It should include:

  • What opportunity exists to make higher education more accessible?
  • What stands in the way of higher education having this right now?
  • Describe your design concept: what is it, what are the input/output elements?

User need finding (public/user-need.html#first-person-heading)

Individually, complete background research on your project as part of the individual first-person accounts assignment, due the same day as this milestone.

Add your a summary of what you individually found to your team documents in (public/user-need.html#first-person-heading)

As a team, draft a consent form for your specific project, using the template we provided in CONSENT.md as a starting point.

Only include the blank template here. Filled-out (signed) consent forms are private, and are due later in a private location as part of Milestone 1 Consent Forms.

Contributions

Update LOG.md#build with your individual contributions. We don’t expect everyone to contribute equally to each assignment, but over time you should support each other.

Contribution statement example

  • Name 1: 40%, researched the background of the problem, outlined the content of the document, wrote the first version of one paragraph, also selected the images to be included
  • Name 2: 15%, conducted 3 interviews and took notes
  • Name 3: 20%, wrote the first version of the background section, made sure the final version got submitted
  • Name 4: 25%, conducted 3 interviews (with Name 2) organized the group meeting, researched the background of the problem, contributed to the formatting of the text

Submitting for grading

At the deadline,

  1. tag your repo (git tag milestone-0 && git push origin milestone-0)
  2. submit the tagged link to your README in Canvas (e.g. .../-/blob/milestone-0/README.md)

Completeness

Checklist (is your assignment complete)

  • index.html#overview has project goals paragraph
  • user-need.html#first-person-heading summarizes eath person's first-person research (with links)
  • CONSENT.md is complete
  • LOG.md#build has an entry from every team member

See Canvas

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