COMP249 Practical Portfolio
As an additional assessment task this year you will create a portfolio of your work stemming from the practical classes. The portfolio is a way of assessing your work that does not require you to hand something in every week and allows you to choose the work you'd like to be assessed on. The portfolio will be worth 15% of the total marks for the unit.
The final submission has been extended to 10pm, Wednesday 4th June. After this date you will no longer be able to edit your portfolio.
The second checkpoint submission will now be made on the 9th May to give you a little space after the assignment submission. However, you should treat the portfolio as an ongoing task and do a little each week. The checkpoints are meant for getting feedback on how you are going, they aren't assessment points.
Your portfolio will consist of the following:
- Three pieces of work that you have written yourself, at least one of these should include some Python scripting (The only exception being the first submission, we won't have done any Python in time)
- One or two paragraphs of commentary on your work; what you have done, why it was challenging etc.
Update: for the first checkpoint submission, it's ok to have only two items of work in your portfolio. Try to say something in your comments about what you would like to do with each item, even if you haven't done it yet. This will help us give you feedback on your ideas as well as your completed work.
The items of work that you submit will be based on tasks set in each week's practical page. At a minimum you may submit solutions to these tasks, however this won't get you very many marks. The intention is that you develop your solution in a direction of your choosing, going beyond the original specification. For example, you might be asked to develop a personal web page; you could extend this with a CSS based design, add Javascript or develop it into a fully fledged website. This is your chance to show us what you have learned in COMP249.
We will give you feedback on your work throughout the semester. First, your practical sessions will be oriented towards producing work for this assessment task. Your practical superviser will be able to help you with technical problems you are having. We then require you to make a submission of your work twice during the semester when we will give you explicit feedback on how well you are doing and what you can do to improve your work. You won't get any marks for this but you must submit something or you will lose marks from the final grading. Finally, we will look at your work at the end of semester and grade it.
The Portfolio Server
Following our experience with this task last year, we have implemented a special web server to support your work on the portfolio and our assessment of it. The server is hosted at portfolio.ics.mq.edu.au and was written with the help of a COMP249 student from last year.
The portfolio server allows you to upload your work and enter your commentary on each piece and on the portfolio as a whole. We can then see your work and provide feedback at the two submission points during the semester.
The server supports static HTML and CSS content and Python based CGI scripts. It won't support things like PHP or ASP. We will provide some video screencasts on how to use the server shortly.
Please note that since the server is new it has probably got bugs and may well crash. We will work hard to fix any issue that surfaces during the semester and will make sure that you aren't disadvantaged in any way. Please contact Steve Cassidy if you find any technical problems with the server.
Schedule
The checkpoint submissions will be:
- Week 5, 25 March
- Week 9, 9 May
The final submission of the portfolio will be on 26th May