How does this program work?
The program initially starts around the beginning of June and ends before the semester starts, typically around mid-August, with the initial meeting taking place virtually to get to know your peers, who you’ll soon realize will become your close friends within this field.
The program is composed of five different parts:
1) Ideation Phase
Every assignment has to stem from an idea!
This phase, typically lasting between 1-2 weeks, consists of writing all of the ideas that come to mind. Since there is a bunch of minds assembled together, there is a plethora of ideas to tackle, assess, and think of. While not all ideas get chosen, the ones that stand out from the rest are assigned to those developers that find themselves curious and eager to learn in that specific area of coding (e.g. Student A likes a DNA assignment, another student liked a Marvel assignment, etc.).
Once every student is assigned a task team to work with, we move onto phase 2.
2) Coding Phase
This is where the fun begins.
This phase takes most of the program’s time, as it is the main goal of this program – to garner knowledge regarding coding and different ways to integrate real-life scenarios into code! Students will be facing various hurdles as they create their assignment, points of which they have to backtrack and redo objects, and many unknown variables await them, but that is the objective! If we knew that the code was wrong all along, we wouldn’t have written it! Therefore, get ready for a lot of errors, debugging, and yells of happiness when the code properly works!
Once the team has concluded their project, they move on to phase 3.
3) Debugging & Wrap-Up Phase
As the main objective is completed, we have to ensure that the objective works as intended!
This phase focuses on ensuring that the assignment does not possess any exploitable flaws and/or bugs that can cause a lot of distress when published. Therefore, the task team is asked to create several test cases to ensure their code tackles edge cases, which is part of the grading criteria.
Once the code tackles various edge cases with accuracy and does not present any visible bugs, they move on to phase 4.
4) Documentation & Guides
It is easy to explain your own code, but impossible to read one’s code from the get-go, that’s why we have phase 4!
This phase consists on the team providing documentation for the future students to be able to comprehend the assignment’s intentions. The developers will provide Java documentation, a Google document providing the explanation of the assignment (similar to the format in ds.cs.rutgers.edu and introcs.cs.rutgers.edu), and a guide for the Tutors, TAs, and course support.
Once those items are fulfilled, you can proudly say you have created an assignment for 01:198:111 and/or 01:198:112 and you’ll move onto phase 5!
5) Your assignment gets released to 1000+ students!
Once the assignment is fully completed, you can expect the assignment to be released in the near future for the students to tackle it!
The best part about it consists of the fact that students help you perfect your assignment by providing feedback about it; therefore, your project is not used once and abandoned, but it is reformed and reshaped so that it strives for perfection!
Once all of these phases are complete – you rinse and repeat!