Presentation and final project grading criteria.

Presentations: Monday May 10th 4pm in Sci 1030.

Each group has to present their project, all group members must participate. Each person is graded individually based on their participation in the presentation. Presentations are informal, 5-7 minutes per group. Each group has to allow time for questions, or, better yet, answer questions interactively as they are presenting.
The following criteria will be used to evaluate presentations:

• Being prepared for the presentation: knowing in advance who shows what features of the blog, not repeating things that you or your partner have already said, not looking surprised by what happens when you submit a form or click a button, etc. Team work counts.
• A well-chosen selection of features to show: focus on things that are interesting and different in your blog. You can show the functionality and/or implementation details. It's OK to show things that are not quite working yet if they are interesting and different, as long as you are prepared to discuss what you tried and what didn't work.
• Demonstrated understanding of the project, based on the presentation itself and on the ability to answer questions.
• Presentation technique: introduce yourself, speak up, look at the audience, and tell an interesting story. You have done work that you should be proud of -- show it!

Final project grading

When submitting the final project, clearly indicate what files are included (and a purpose of those that are not obvious, such as included helper files, css files if multiple are used, etc.). Also clearly describe the extra features of your blog and how they are implemented. If any testing data is needed (such as user accounts/passwords, search data or post tags), please include it in your e-mail. The clarity of explanations matters.

If something is not quite working, a clear description of what it is and why it is not working helps. Mention what you would've tried to do to fix the issue if you had more time. Important: if something is not working in a page, you might want to comment it out so that the rest of the page works.

The entire project will be graded based on the overall appearance and functionality.
All pages must be xhtml-compliant, and all css files must validate. Look at the design of your pages: is there a lot of empty space? How does the page look when resized or when a larger font is used?
All features should be working. I do a significant amount of testing: logging in, logging out, posting, commenting, following the "more" links, entering wrong data into forms, etc. It is important that the blog doesn't just "die" on wrong data but provides some reasonable error messages. Make sure that you can navigate in the blog without having to hit the "back" button. Show your blog to a friend and watch them explore it, then you will know what works and what doesn't.

CSci 1101 course web site.