The goal of design reviews is to help us TAs track your progress and
help discover potential mistakes as early as possible. We want to make sure
that you can finish the project before it's due so you have time to catch
and resolve design errors and avoid frustrating last-minute debugging.
For the design reviews, you should have seriously thought about all aspects of
the project so you can get a clear idea of how you will complete it.
It is a good idea to have started some coding at this stage and for you to
have investigated what tools will be necessary and have them working.
Mistakes at this stage are by no means a sign of lack of progress.
But we do want you to be able to show that you have carefully thought about the project.
When you meet with the TA, please have some materials prepared to show that
you have come up with a plan. These materials can be in the form of pseudocode prepared,
a flowchart, or whatever else you think appropriate. Depending on the project, we might also
want you to provide running code, or answer questions.
Your design reviews will be graded from 0 to 5 points. To complete a graded design
review, each working group or student will meet with a TA for 10 minutes
the week before the project is due.