Weekly Class Participation reporting (wcpX)

Each week, you have the ability to earn class participation credit by performing any of the available activities (for some amount of points) per week within any stated constraints, in order to attain a given point threshold (varying from week to week or as a general progression throughout the semester).

Measuring participation fulfills a vital role of gauging individual involvement and interactivity in on-going class activities, not just their ability to perform assigned projects.

Being exposed to and interacting with the subject matter helps to improve understanding, and eventually fluency, yet the trends these days seem to involve more and more people only putting forth effort for a class DURING said class (often at the expense of the actual in-class activity going on).

Some may think it is time well spent, but when I find myself constantly repeating myself days, weeks, even months later, it is clear that something needs to be done in order to improve individual participation in the course.

The following are a list of available activities, along with current weekly claim caps, and point values that you can perform for participation credit in a given week.

Watch this space, as new activities may be added, or old ones obsoleted (either conditionally or entirely), along with tweaks to claim caps and point values.

You will see that, in a normal week a TOTAL of 16 points are currently possible.

Each week I will require some subset of the above-stated activities to be done for participation, giving you choices on how you'd like to earn this credit. Depending on the combination, I may consider participation activities done in excess of the weekly cap as some form of bonus (applied to the participation component).

NOTE: The eligibility for claiming a discord attribute is based on:

• on-topic, contextually-relevant discord messages sent to respective class channel by the discord username you notified me of at the start of the semester
  • e-mails and direct messages in discord do not count towards this. AT ALL. Part of your responsibility in the class is to participate in the learning environment with others.
  • if you opt to change your discord username during the semester, my script will not automatically recognize the change and any otherwise legitimate activity performed will not be processed. You must notify me of any changes so I can update my records.
    • any credit lost as a result of a lack of timely notification (especially within a given week) for discord attribute credit will not be retroactively granted (it is your responsibility to notify me in a timely manner).
• During week 1, since we are just getting started, generalchat messages will be included in the list of acceptable participation sources (but will only be included for consideration in the first week).
• Pertinent interactions on puzzl-y-tastic will also count towards acceptable participation sources
• cap on bonus points: one can only earn AT MOST HALF the stated weekly points in bonus form (or 2, if the halfway value is less than 2).
• the time threshold between earnable points starts at 192 minutes, and will increment by 192 with each passing earned attribute throughout the given week
• only posts (or accumulations of posts) of at least 32 words will be considered eligible. Accumulated triggers will only come to fruition once the necessary time lapse has transpired.

wcp activity analysis is automated: the wcp tool will show you a daily report of what you've currently accumulated (updated once per day, sometime around midnight).

As part of your validation for claiming these attributes, leave a written record on your journal of the nature of your activities; if you asked a question, what was it, what was the gist of the answer, and what new insights did you gain from the experience?

If you submitted early, what project and how early? And how did your advance work on it (well before the deadline) help you (not rushing, less anxiety, luxury of time to think, etc.)

At least, it may offer a writing prompt to help you get started on your weekly journal entries.

Each week there will be a wcpX report started for you to view your accumulated participation credit, which can be viewed using the wcp tool (on lab46).

Failure to adequately participate under the terms of the available attributes by the deadline will result in lost credit: remembering and time management are important skills as well!

The report will start on Thursday, and close by the end of that week Wednesday. You have between the open and close of a reporting period to perform your recognized participation activities.

Following will be a list of participation point tallies you will need to accumulate in a given week to get full credit:

There are no make-ups. If you miss performing an activity, you can either make up the credit by other participation activities, or even make up for lost credit with bonus points in other weeks.

I would highly recommend keeping an activity log of your participation activities for each week (might be a good recap to put as part of your weekly journal entry), as it may help reinforce your management of time with respect to accomplishing projects throughout the week.

The sanctioned participation activities, when performed, leave a digital trail, which I capture.

The spirit of this activity is that you are making genuine and honest contributions to participation each and every week.

If you are within the report window for a particular week (say, week1, so the wcp1 participation report is active), you can view your report using the wcp tool.

It takes 2 arguments:

1. the class designation you are making the claim for (c4eng, cprog, unix, data, discrete, comporg, sysprog, hpc0, etc.)
2. the wcpNUM report name (where NUM is 1 for wcp1/week1, 2 for wcp2/week2, etc.)

And you can do so as follows (replace 'DESIG' with your lowercase class designation, for the appropriate week):

lab46:~$ wcp DESIG wcpNUM

This should bring up the current report, displayed to STDOUT in your lab46 terminal.