Coursework
COGS 300 is a 4-credit course with 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of lab. UBC guidelines are that you should expect to spend 2-3 hours working outside of class for every hour of class time. For this course, that is 10-15 hours per week. You will not succeed in this course unless you indeed spend that time. Much of your mark is dependent on active participation, peer evaluation, and self-evaluation. Attendance is mandatory and will be checked, participation is also mandatory and will be evaluated both by course staff and peers.
COGS 300 is an unusual course for some students because it is taught as a design course. The assignments are purposefully written to not include extensive rubrics, exact directions, or with plentiful examples. This is because, in a design course, you are expected to actually practice designing, which is a creative practice. Being a designer means making up solutions that are not yet known. We will teach you how, but you must get good at making things up yourself.
By and large, we are taking inspiration from the "ungrading" movement. That is to say, the point of grading in this course is to keep everyone on track with learning outcomes and to evaluate mastery of skills. So, although we do "grade" to ensure that people are getting adequate feedback, we would prefer to spend our time teaching. Similarly, we prefer you spend your study time developing practical skills drawing, building, discussing, and testing. We believe that anyone who fully participates will reasonably master the subject, so our grading is oriented towards encouraging practice.
However, this puts the onus on you, the student, to become responsible for your own learning in this course, and not everybody has the practice of discipline needed for that. We do indeed show you everything you need to succeed in this course, but you have to choose to practice it on your own. Set aside time to do the exercises given in class. If you do not know how to do an exercise, teaching staff is happy to guide you, but nobody can make you practice but you.
Marking Breakdown
| Item | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Final Exam | 10 |
| Labs | 25 |
| Personal project | 35 |
| Sketchbook | 30 |
Final Exam (10%)
A written final exam. It will look very similar to the in-class design challenges. See the final exam page for more info.
Sketchbook (30%)
| Item | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Pre-readings and in-class work | 15 |
| Module design challenges | 15 |
You will be required to maintain a physical, hand-written sketchbook. Your sketchbook should be a record of your creative engagement with the course. Everything should be recorded in it: daily drawings, in-class design challenge, module design challenges, and project sketches and documentation.
See the sketchbook page for details.
Personal project (35%)
| Item | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Pitch and sketches | 1 |
| Paper prototype | 1 |
| Planning documents (BOM, budget, etc.) | 1 |
| Works-like prototype | 2 |
| Sketchbook review | 5 |
| Final prototype | 15 |
| Documentation (in sketchbook) | 10 |
The personal project will be a creative electronics project that you take on yourself. It is the individual assessment of the course that (largely) replaces the final exam in a standard course. You will use it to demonstrate your mastery over basic mechatronics as taught in this course and make connections to course concepts.
See the personal project page for details.
Labs (25%)
| Item | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Labs 01-10 and Tournament | 20 |
| Peer evaluation | 5 |
The core of the course is the labs. You will be mostly working with a group to complete an autonomous robot that navigates an obstacle course and participates in a final tournament. Lab attendance is absolutely mandatory, but participation outside of scheduled lab time will also be necessary.
You will usually be marked on a 0-5 scale for labs:
- 5: Exceptional demonstration of lab concepts (exceeds requirements)
- 4: Good demonstration of lab concepts (meets requirements)
- 3: Reasonable demonstration of lab concepts (one or two requirements unclear)
- 2: Missing one or two lab concepts
- 1: Missing most lab concepts
- 0: No attendance/no completion.
Exceeding requirements means that you do more than you are explicitly told to do. You don't need to go absolutely wild with this, but you do need to exceed the basic outline. Normally, we will tell you how you can possibly exceed requirements. The point of this is to get you into a creative zone outside of what we can dictate.