Each week, you have the ability to earn class participation credit by performing any of the following activities (for some amount of points) per week, in order to attain a stated point threshold (likely varying by week or general progression of 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 44 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).

Certain class configurations may see overrides to some of the requirements stated here, if it enables better symbiosis with the class. Such alterations will be stated on class-specific information sources (such as class project pages); if you do not see an exception, assume none applies to you.

As part of your validation for claiming these attributes, leave a written record on your journal of the nature of your activities; if you e-mailed me 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 wcp# project for you to submit your participation activity claim, which is done using a dedicated wcp tool.

Failure to submit your claim by the deadline will result in lost credit: remembering and time management are important skills as well!

The project will open up at the start of each week (Thursday), and close by the end of that week (Wednesday). There are NO LATE submissions.

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 I may ask you to provide additional information to back up your claim.

If you are unable to substantiate your claim, any claimed credit may be voided for that particular week.

Some of these participation activities, when performed, leave a digital trail, which I endeavor to capture. Others are more analog in nature (ie asking a question in class).

By making a claim, I am assuming you are making a just and honest claim to having performed said activity.

If you are within the submit window for a particular week (say, week1, so the wcp1 participation project), you can make your claim using the wcp tool.

It takes 2 arguments:

1. the class designation you are making the claim for (c4eng, cprog, unix, data, discrete, etc.)
2. the wcp# project name (wcp1 for week1, wcp2 for week2, etc.)

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

lab46:~$ wcp desig wcp#

This should bring up an interactive dialog with a list of checkboxes.

Use the up/down arrow keys, and the space bar to toggle selections (it is a checkbox, so you can select 0 or more).

When done, you can simply hit ENTER to submit.

Your terminal prompt should be returned to you, and you should be greeted with the message “SUBMISSION COMPLETE”, and hopefully no error messages.

And that's it! Simply rinse and repeat for each regular week of the semester (I will NOT be collecting participation during break weeks).