Once you've reviewed the course readings, you will watch a lecture pre-video, which will introduce the major concepts that the lecture will cover. These pre-videos allow us to reduce the amount of time in the day you have to spend in Zoom and allow you to have more flexibility in how and when you engage the course material. Once you've watched the pre-video, you will take a quiz. The purpose of the quiz is not to 'test' you but to improve your understanding and retention of the material by having you immediately apply the material you just learned about. It also gives you immediate feedback about how well you understood the material, so you know if you need to review the readings and pre-video in more depth. You may take the quiz as many times as you like to improve your score. You will get full credit for a quiz taken before the scheduled lecture time, and half credit if the quiz is taken after the scheduled lecture.
Over the course of the semester, you will document your thoughts and ideas in response to the readings in a design workbook. Each page in your workbook will identify a specific idea from the reading that caught your attention, and explore its implications through a rough design sketch, annotated with thoughts about how the design relates to, extends, challenges, or otherwise explores the idea you chose to respond to. At the end of each unit, you will submit the portion of your design workbook that responds to readings from that unit. It will be easiest if you write up each design response directly after finishing the corresponding reading, rather than waiting until the end of your unit. You should expect each design response in your workbook to take about 20 minutes to execute. If you find it taking significantly longer, please visit office hours for aid in tuning up your strategies for crafting responses.
Your participation in class is essential to your success in the course. In class we will analyze, build on, and debate about the course readings; practice design skills; work on homeworks; and engage in other activities to aid your facility in the course material. We cover material in lecture and section that is not available through any other means. While you will benefit most from participating in the live lecture, which allows you to make use of interactive elements to improve your understanding, we realize time zones vary and health levels fluctuate. Lecture video will be made available. Please be aware there will be a time lag in releasing video recordings to allow for the production of accurate captioning, and lecture videos are available for 48 hours after release only except by prior arrangement with the instructor.
Sections are not recorded to allow for the privacy of section participants and their contributions. We strongly encourage you to attend, unless you are ill. In previous years, we found that lack of significant engagement in section resulted in an average grade drop of a full letter grade in this course, compared to students who attended.
We do not excuse individual absences in this course. We understand that people will sometimes have family conflicts, job interviews, religious commitments, illnesses, and other reasons why they cannot come to class/ If you have a serious situation that will potentially force you to miss a significant number of classes, please contact Prof. Csíkszentmihályi at cpc83 @ cornell.edu or via Ed Discussions to make an alternative plan for covering course material.
Over the course of the semester, you will have 4 design mini-projects which will help you develop facility in some of the design methods we are learning about in the course.
The final exam will be a written exam involving a critically engaged design analysis and exploration on an assigned topic in current events. The exam questions, minus the topic, will be released in April so that you can prepare for it.
Grading is not just a matter of numbers, but also of judgment. The instructors reserve the right to adjust grades by up to half a letter grade based on knowledge of your performance not summed up in this tidy formula.
My expectation is that you are generally aware of the need for academic integrity and self-motivated to achieve it. Issues with academic integrity that have come up in my courses in the past have been frequently due to students being unaware of the specific requirements of academic integrity at Cornell, rather than students trying to "game the system" for their own advantage. Some examples of situations I have encountered include: