This project grade consists of two components -- a presentation, and a series of responses to other students' presentations.

Submit: Post a link to your presentation in the D2L Discussion Board for the course by the deadline above.

Post: Responses to two other student's submissions in the D2L Discussion Board by the start of Finals Week.

Work is to be completed individually for this assignment. Be certain to include your name clearly in the presentation.

The Presentation

Give a brief overview of your assigned influential computer scientist, as determined by the class project assignment spreadsheet. (See D2L or class e-mail for link.)

Possible topics of interest:

• Who were/are they?
• What background did they have?
• What did they do that influenced computing?

For those associated with a programming language:

• What were the principle goals of the language?
• Who were its intended programmers?
• Who were its actual programmers?
• When was / is the language in wide usage?
• What languages is it a descendent of or ancestor to? Are there dialects or siblings languages?
• What impact did this language have on programmers, programming practice, and other programming languages?

Your presentation could include small snippets of example code that demonstrates key computing innovations.

The format of this presentation should be a prerecorded video, and can be privately posted on YouTube (or equivalent) or uploaded directly to D2L (if you're feeling lucky.)

Your video presentation can include multimedia artifacts (pictures, sound files, video), or just narrated slides, but must not exceed 5 minutes in length.

Your video presentation must include a closing bibliography/credit slide(s) that cites at least three primary sources about your topic, and clearly credits any excerpted recordings or text. Wikipedia is generally not considered a primary source. The ACM Turing Award site is an excellent primary source for this project. However, this project is intended to be your own synthesis of the material -- "in your own words", as we used to say -- and should not consist of more than 50% excerpted or quoted directly from another presentation.

Responses

In the D2L Discussion thread, view and respond to the presentations of at least three other students in the course. You should respond to at least the three students who immediately follow your row in the class signup spreadsheet, modulo the size of the list.

Responses should include an assessment of three main criteria:

1. To what extent does the presentation explain the significance of the subject computer scientist's work at a level appropriate for peer computer students in COSC 3410?
2. To what extent are appropriate primary sources selected and properly credited to inform the presentation?
3. To what extent are the maximum of five minutes used effectively to inform the viewer?

These three criteria, which we can think of in abbreviated terms as "content, sources, and style", should each be evaluated using a three point scale:

• 0 = Not at all
• 1 = Present
• 2 = Great Job!

and a brief justification for each rating should be provided.

Grading

Student responses and their ratings are not a factor in the grading of your own presentation. (So there is no special advantage to grading your peers harshly or producing needlessly positive appraisals.)

Project 10 grades will consist of 30 points for your own presentation, assessed by the professor using a 10-point version of the same three criteria given above. A final 10 points (for a total of 40) will be assessed by the existence and quality of responses to your peers.

The Exam

The Final Exam will include a significant question on computer science history. Your collected presentations should be considered the study guide for this module of the course.