Assignment Pre-Submissions

This assessment task requires you to begin planning your assignment and to prepare a brief design proposal indicating what you plan to build and how you will do it.

The assessment will be conducted in lab and will be worth 1 mark for each assignment.

You will need to fork and clone the assignment template repository and fill in a design proposal (200 words or fewer) that outlines what your planned design is and how you will accomplish it.

Outline

• Submission Dates:
  • Assignment 1 Pre-submission: Due by the start of your week 5 lab.
  • Assignment 2 Pre-submission: Due by the start of your week 9 lab.
• Weight: 1 mark per assignment (total of 2% of your final mark).
• Length: 200 words or fewer
• Submission: GitLab

Process:

Read this process carefully. If you show up to your lab without completing the process below up to step 4, you will get zero.

Completing your Pre-Submission:

1. Carefully read the assignment specification and understand what you are being asked to do.

2. Fork and clone the assignment template.

3. Think of an idea for what you might like to do for your assignment, write it down in the file design-proposal.md which is contained in your assignment repo. You need to explain “what” you want to build and (roughly), “how” you will accomplish it in ARM-v7 assembly on the micro:bit. The word limit is 200 words.

4. Commit and push your edited design-proposal.md file.

5. Read the assignment specification again and think: Does my proposal meet the specification? Am I building what is expected for this assignment? Is there scope to extend my proposal? If the answer to these questions is “no” then go back to step 2.

Getting your feedback and applying it:

1. Attend your lab and have a discussion with your tutor about your design proposal. Listen to their feedback (you might want to take notes). You’ll receive a mark on Streams at the start of the next week.

2. Think about your feedback; you will likely want to adjust your assignment idea to better match the specification or otherwise take on board suggestions from your tutor.

3. Start coding your assignment and writing your design document!

Marking Rubric

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are we doing this? I just wanna code.

The assignments in this course ask you to build creative and expressive programs for your micro:bit. You will need to come up with an idea that meets the assignment specification and is also possible given your (rapidly expanding) knowledge of ARM-v7 assembly language and the micro:bit itself.

Defining an idea is hard so this assessment task focusses just on the early design stage for your assignments. This serves two purposes:

1. It helps you by getting you to define your idea before you even start coding and giving you a guaranteed way to get feedback.

2. It acknowledges that articulation work (writing down an idea) is actually work and can be part of your final mark for the class.

The feedback you get from your tutor here is likely to be the most important feedback you get in the course. The tutors will be able to point out improvements to almost everybody’s idea. Everybody will benefit from an early second opinion on their design proposal and will likely create better assignments.

It is very likely that the tutors will also talk to a few students where the idea is unlikely to result in a good assignment. It might be way too hard or maybe it will not actually meet the assignment specification. If this is you then you are getting amazing value from this assessment. You just saved yourself a lot of frustration from working hard in the wrong direction.

I don’t want to do this. Do we have to?

No, you don’t have to do anything. But you won’t get a mark for this assessment item unless you do it.

Can I submit my design proposal in a different way?

No, you must follow the process above.

Will I get my mark in the lab?

No, your mark will be released at the start of the week after your pre-submission lab.