Last modified: Monday, 09-Oct-2023 22:05:31 UTC. Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (eeb4 at psu.edu). Powered by firebellies.

Requirements for initiating semester projects

Projects in the DIGIT 110, 210, and 400 courses at Penn State Behrend involve students working in teams to share coding tasks over multiple stages of development across a semester. Teams should be small, between two and four students, and team work will require meeting regularly (ideally once per week outside of class) with teammates to share, review, assign, and update tasks for project development, such that each student has clear and well-documented responsibilities. We will conduct projects in these courses using git for version control of code, together with GitHub’s project management tools to curate the project work and to record each student's contributions. These requirements should help to ensure that semester project team work can proceed fairly with a reasonably equitable division of labor among the students.

To join a project

Successful completion of a semester project depends upon reliable contributions by each team member. Therefore students must demonstrate they are prepared for responsible participation on a coding project before they may join a semester project team. A student becomes eligible to join a project team only when they have successfully completed each of the following requirements:

A student must demonstrate competence to create git commits and pushes to the class’s shared GitHub repository and to their own personal repository.
A student must have satisfactorily completed the majority of assigned class work to demonstrate preparation for the activities required to launch a project using the technologies involved in the course.

If around the time that project teams are forming you do not meet these requirements, you must meet with the professor to help you catch up with urgent missed work in a timely fashion (no more than a week or two given the limited time available inside a semester), or to help determine whether it is best to withdraw from the course and take it later.

To support your team

Project team members who do not participate will be noticed and warned, and if they cease participation for more than two weeks without any contact with the team or the professor, they will be removed from their team assignment. We understand that catastrophes and crises happen in life, and we present these requirements during a global pandemic with all its disruptive consequences. We understand that keeping up with schedule demands during a semester is often challenging, and therefore we ask each team member to take seriously the bonds created in forming a project team and sharing work. Each student assigned to a project team must do the following:

Look out for each other: As you begin work with your teammates, exchange contact information and know how to reach other other reliably.
Make sure each team member can see and understand tasks assigned to them. When the team GitHub repository is created, find a good, highly visible way to post task lists and review them regularly with each other.
Alert the professor if a student withdraws from team participation and cannot be reached for several days.
Make sure that each team member’s work is valued and respected. This includes making sure each team member has an important role in the project, and intervening to prevent any one person from taking on more than an equitable share of work.