Your participation

Everything the course asks of you, as one list — the week-1 setup, the weekly rhythm, the assignment deadlines and the standing responsibilities — with links to the detail

COMP4020/8020 from your seat: what you set up once, what you do every week, and the handful of one-off deadlines. This page is deliberately terse, with every line linked to further detail. The assessment page explains the grade: the ten weekly crits account for 20%, the three assignments account for the other 80%, and 50% overall is a pass, with no hurdles.

Once, in week 1#

Complete the setup below and your first prototype before your week 2 crit. Start the day your enrolment comes through instead of the day before the cutoff.

• work through onboarding — accounts, tools, your API key (behind a short Canvas access quiz) and the course skills plugin, all working before week 2
• register for a crit group through MyTimetable before the start of week 2 — see enrolment
• accept the course GitHub org invitation when it arrives — promptly, since invitations expire after seven days
• clone the lecture-demos repo — you’ll work in it most weeks, all semester
• build your first prototype — there’s no crit in week 1, but C1 freezes at your cutoff before your week 2 session

Every week#

• Thursday lecture (two hours) — set the demo’s premise at the launch, and call something out at each of the two check-ins. Bring your laptop and your lecture-demos clone if you want to run the check-ins yourself as well (reset the clone first). The lecture structure has the format
• the build — run /comp4020:start, then work in that week’s private repo: prototype, checks kept green, reflection, commits as you go. The week’s spec is on its crit page, and what you submit lists the repo contents
• your cutoff (two hours before your crit session) — freeze the prototype, submit the written reflection, flip the repo public. The course /ship skill makes it one command, and nobody flips it for you. Fifteen minutes later an automated sweep records what’s live, and that record is your shipped mark — how the marks work
• your crit (90 minutes) — three jobs: critiquing your group’s crit agent’s prototype with everyone; presenting your own live URL to your pod, and critiquing theirs; and the riff, mob-programming an agent from the agent’s fork. The studio crit model walks through all three
• attend every crit — crit marks depend on attendance: miss the session and both of that week’s marks are zero, even if you shipped. For a known clash, arrange in advance to attend another group’s session that same week, via a private Ed Discussion thread to your tutor — see crit attendance. One lost week is recoverable at the week 12 redeemable crit

Weeks that run differently#

• week 1 — no crit: setup and the C1 build
• weeks 4 and 7 — no fresh prototype, but a written retro of the assignment you just submitted, due by the usual cutoff. At the week 7 crit, show your Fly.io token working against your crit-7 app
• week 8 — the first crit of the full-stack half, which starts at the week 7 lecture: prototypes now deploy to Fly.io rather than GitHub Pages
• weeks 9–11 — the crits run on your final project itself, in one repo, public from your week 9 cutoff
• week 12 — no regular crit; for most of you it’s working time for finalising the final project. The exception is the redeemable crit: an optional extra sitting, open to all, run in the second slot of each crit pair, that replaces one earlier crit mark of 1 or below

Three assignments#

For each assignment, you use the weekly process on a larger brief over a longer period, with the same repo structure. All three are due at noon on a Monday with a 15-minute grace period. There are no late submissions, but extensions are easy to get before the deadline.

COMP8020 students also write a critical research note as part of the final project — the brief has the detail. And once every project is in, the optional, unmarked capstone showcase closes the semester.

All semester#

• manage your weekly Claude allocation — automated warnings arrive as private Ed messages at 50%, 90% and 100%, and running out is never an acceptable excuse for a missed deadline: see usage allocation
• use the right channel — this website for course information, Ed for questions and everything personal, Canvas for marks and recordings: see communication
• be able to explain your work — the agent is a collaborator, but the work is yours to account for, on request: see AI use