COMS W4170

3 Assignments over the whole semester 5 Project checkpoints that are iterative Checkpoints culminate in a final presentation & deliverable of some piece of technology solving a design problem. (Some examples are "Yelp for Columbia Water Fountains", "Collaborative Study Meetup App", etc.) Small Pre-class quizzes (very easy and 1 before each class) Attendance polls every class for participation grade No Exams (but this means you have to work hard on your project)

2 assignments per week (shouldn't take more than a couple hours) 1 midterm project 1 final project (The projects take a decent amount of time and effort, but you get a lot of time)

Reading other reviews of this class left me surprised, though I believe that Professor Smith took efforts to address student feedback in order to improve class. That being said, if you are taking this class because you have heard it is easy, Professor Smith is kind Professor, or it just hits a requirement, FIND ANOTHER CLASS. This class is at its best when you actually care about building something for real User Experiences. This also requires a significant effort to engage with the users you state you will serve in your project. Professor Smith IS kind and IS a great Professor who clearly cares about what he teaches. If you just want to have an easy coast class, please spare the seat for someone who actually wants to learn this material. There is so much you can learn from this class and a lot you can actually accomplish in the semester if you figure out something you have passionate for and want to design around. You will learn about the psychology around User-Centered Design as well as ways this is actually implemented in industry, while also learning about topics like accessibility, the design cycle, and the absolute importance of grounding your design work in human experience. Of course you will do some front-end work in React and learn about CSS but this is really all in service of learning what it means to design good human experiences with technology.

Lydia is a great professor. She is extremely energetic and her lectures are super engaging... which is shame because you really don't have to watch a single lecture (or even look at the slides) to do well in this class... The few times I did attend lectures, the examples of "good web design" were screenshots from the early 2010's (with website design typical of that time period) so I would say this class is a bit out dated. But nonetheless, this class is great at slowly developing your frontend skills from 0 to being able to build a fully functional website. The midterm and final projects are both fun to work on and the deadlines are super lenient. Easy A class, gives you great projects.

5 long-winded individual HW; 5 group project checkpoints; 4 mandatory TA meetings for the project; A bunch of pre-class quizzes, which showed up at random times, so you had to constantly check to avoid missing them. I’ve never had a class where a quiz was posted after midnight, asking for slides for a same-day debate.

12 (almost) weekly assignments (each counted for 5% of final grade), a Midterm project (10% of final grade), Final project (20% of final grade), participation and attendance in TA sessions after Spring Break (10% of final grade). Lecture attendance is not required, and Professor Chilton posts lecture recordings. If you follow all the instructions in the HWs and projects and asked for feedback on your work, you will get a 100%. No A+ grades are given out. BTW: TA sessions are basically these meetings you have with ~10 students and your TA (chosen by you if there's room in the session) each Wednesday after Spring break. Each group talks about their progress on their project/their work in HWs 7-12 and gets feedback from the TA. Before Spring break, lectures were on Mondays and Wednesdays. After Spring break, lectures were only on Mondays, with TA sessions (only 45 mins) being on Wednesdays.

I enrolled in this class based on the positive reviews I saw, but it turned out to be one of the worst decisions I've made. While the overall workload isn't significantly heavier than other CS classes, the disorganization and the behavior of the TAs stripped away my sanity. To be fair, the professor’s passion for the subject is undeniable, but the class itself feels like a chaotic experiment. It often seems like we’re being used as part of an iterative trial-and-error process. Unfortunately, the TAs only make things worse. They are unhelpful, disrespectful to students, and difficult to work with(at least for the ones I had contact with). Scheduling mandatory group meetings is a challenge, questions on Ed rarely get answered, and the grading process—despite having a rubric—feels subjective and unclear. The TA assigned to my group, in particular, made the experience far worse(one is the head TA). They seemed entitled, focused more on their own preferences than on supporting students. For instance, we were required to submit video explanations for coding assignments (because grading code directly was "too much trouble"), and the TAs insisted the video links be included in multiple places—like the README file, Gradescope, and sometimes even an answer PDF. If there were mistakes in the homework instructions, they wouldn’t clarify or answer questions, which only added to the confusi…

Professor Chilton's lectures are extremely engaging. This class is easy (speaking from someone who doesn't have prior web dev experience). There are only assignments and projects, no exams. Assignments 1-6 helps you practice the web dev stuff you learn in class (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, JQuery, Flask). The Midterm project, which is an individual project, builds on to Assignment 6 (a database website with the topic of your choice) by adding more features and also focusing on graphic design. The Final project, which is encouraged to be done in groups (you choose your own groups as long as your group members are in your TA session, and you can make an exception with your TA to work on it individually), allows you to create a website teaching users a topic of your choice. Professor Chilton highly encourages students to use ChatGPT in their assignments and projects, which made this class easy. However, I would encourage you to still engage with the learning process to really benefit from this class. Even if ChatGPT doesn't help, there are 32 TAs holding OHs every week. Note that Professor Chilton does not give out any A+s. Unlike HWs 1-6 and the projects, some parts in HWs 7-12, which were used to guide students in their final projects, felt like busy work, but I found many parts of them to be very helpful because you can create your prototype and your TA will give you fee…

5 Assignment that were 10~15 pages long. 1 semester long project (starts early October) please make sure you know who u want to work with Grading is fine, at the end of the semester he said most ppl are getting As Honestly, I think my year was an odd year, he is trying to revise the syllabus by adding more code/application so it will prob be better next year. But I do not think this is a chill class compared to what other reviews stated

There were 12 assignments total. The first 6 (before the midterm) were fully individual and exercises in recreating a UI or designing a mini-project. I thought these were super useful and were great practice. I really liked the midterm project, too. But assignments 7-12 felt like 100% busywork. They were all geared toward completing the final project and guiding you along. As someone who doesn't deal well with microassignments that feel pointless, I waited until the last minute and did them all in one night. The final project itself was also pretty chill. I was able to finish half a semester's worth of work in one sitting, so do with that what you will.