Assignment 2

The second individual prototype: a whole course website for a course of your own design, marked on the legibility of your process and your response to the brief.

The brief#

Design the university course you wish existed, and build the website that runs it.

Your job is to create a new course for Slop University (SlopU). In particular your job is to build the course website as a student in the course would see it. There is no separate curriculum document, so every decision about the course lands in the site. Assignment 1 was one page with one interaction; this is twenty-odd pages that have to agree with each other.

You get to choose the topic/subject of the course, including the course title. Make it niche: a subject narrow enough that no real university would run it, but with enough depth to be taught for a full semester. A course that would pass unnoticed through a curriculum committee is too broad, and rebuilding COMP4020 with just a find-and-replace for a different topic is too low-effort. Sincere, deadpan and satirical courses are all fine, but you still need to deliver a real course website. You will be provided a SlopU-branded course website template repo as a starting point, and there will be a real SlopU “programs and courses” page where you can browse everything the cohort creates in this assignment (although you don’t have to build that part—just the website itself).

It’s really important that your course’s curriculum is coherent. A course is one idea explored throughout a semester, and two key things we’re looking for are: does it hold together, and would (a hypothetical) someone want to take it? An agent will write lots of ‘content shaped chunks’, making sure they hang together is your job. You should make sure the prose isn’t just ‘AI slop’, too; the best curricula have a unique and compelling voice.

Three real courses, each a site that carries one idea all the way through:

• Calling Bullshit — a point of view stated in the title and held for a semester
• How to Make (Almost) Anything — a syllabus that is a list of machines and a course that is the sum of them
• CS 007: Personal Finance for Engineers — narrow audience, plain register, no filler

They aren’t held up as ‘gold standard’, and you’re not required to follow their conventions closely. Courses, universities and education theorists all have their own things to say about designing a course, and looking around at a few is part of your job. What you take from that is a position on what a good course is, and you get to tell us about how you incorporated that into your harness in your PROCESS.md.

Your repo will be automatically provisioned from the course-site starter: the Slop ‘template’, the content model, a working deck, placeholder content and one data-integrity check. Its README.md draws the line between what is fixed and what is yours; its CLAUDE.md arrives with no rules in it, because the harness is yours to write and nothing about the platform is pre-recorded in it. The university is fixed and the course is yours: SlopU’s name, marks and palette, the content collections and the generated API stay as they arrived, and everything a course gets to decide—the pages, slide decks, components, navigation, artwork, styling and every word of content—is up to you.

As well as a course title your course will have a SLOPxxxx course code. The last three digits will be chosen for you in your template repo, and no other course in the cohort has them; you choose the first digit (the level) according to the usual ANU course level scheme: 1xxx-4xxx for UG, 6xxx or 8xxx for PG (the level is up to you, and doesn’t affect your grade). The template artwork is a placeholder like the rest, and pnpm check:evidence will not pass it.

What you submit#

• the deployed site (a GitHub Pages URL) — this is what gets marked
• the source repository it was built from — this is how we read your code and your checks
• evidence of process: your PROCESS.md, your CLAUDE.md and the commit history behind them. The assessment page sets out what each one is and how to cite commits; the starter’s PROCESS.md template shows the shape. PROCESS.md runs to 400–600 words and is your own account, written by you for a reader, of how you got from this brief to the harness and agentic workflow behind the site you are submitting. Write it as one narrative: how directing this particular course changed what you asked the agent for and what you accepted back, rather than a run of fixes with a commit hash apiece. For this assignment that narrative has a spine: what you decided a good university course looks like, which of those decisions you encoded in the harness — as a rule in CLAUDE.md or a check in spec/ — and which you deliberately left out. Cite commits as you go — an uncited claim isn’t evidence, and pnpm check:evidence fails a PROCESS.md with no citations in it. There is no separate reflection for this assignment: the week 7 retro presents the breakthrough from this same file.

The submission mechanics, the marking environment, deadlines, extensions and appeals are the same for every task and live on the assessment page. Read it before you submit.

How it’s marked#

Worth 20% of the course, just like Assignment 1. Three criteria, each marked out of 100:

Markers read the site the way a prospective student would, for about ten minutes: the home page, a few non-adjacent weeks, an assessment, the deck and the policies page if there is one, at both viewports. Twelve weeks that repeat one another, or a site that reads as the starter with the nouns swapped, says something about your ‘response to the brief’, regardless of whether or not the CI checks pass. Restyling isn’t required, though: the artefact criterion asks whether the site works, not what it looks like, and a course that keeps the starter’s look but reads as one coherent, compelling course can land in HD on every criterion.

Then your PROCESS.md, read against the commit history and the CLAUDE.md it points at. Process is the largest criterion, and deliberately so: corroboration is the floor of that band rather than the top of it. What lifts a PROCESS.md into the HD is the part no commit can supply on its own — why a call beat the obvious one, and how you knew the result was right before you accepted it. Here the calls worth explaining are course-design calls as much as technical ones: your spec/ checks are read as the record of what you decided had to stay true about your course.

The band descriptors are on the assessment page.

Key dates#

• Due: noon, Monday 21 September 2026, the first day back after the mid-semester break
• Marks and feedback returned: Friday 2 October 2026

There are no late submissions, but extensions are easy to arrange before the deadline — see the assessment page for how.

This is an individual assessment.