The basic principle is we want each of you to engage each week by attending lecture or commenting on the class website. Examples of ways to get full points for each week:

  • Attend both lectures that week in person
  • Attend one lecture in person and make 1 meaningful comment to the online lecture slides
  • Can't make it to any lecture but make 3 meaningful comment to the online lecture slides

Taking attendance in lecture

Attendance will be taken by filling in a web form at a certain random time each lecture. Your form submission needs to be within five minutes of this time (i.e. don’t worry if you were in bathroom). We expect you to stay for the full lecture to get credit. To discourage gaming the system, we will rarely audit at some point close to end of lecture by asking you to email a photo of yourself in lecture (failing audit due to cheating will be severely frowned upon).

The gory, yet mathematically intriguing, details of the point system

Each week you will earn a maximum of 1.5 points toward your participation. Extra points you earn from one week can be carried (partially) to the previous or next week.

  • Each lecture attendance gives you 1 point. If it’s a holiday, everyone gets a point.
  • Every meaningful contribution to the online lecture slides will give you 0.5 points
  • Inspired by our understanding of aliasing, we will apply this procedure to calculate weekly points:
    • You earn points on a particular day
    • We blur your points over two weeks (if you must know, using a triangle-function convolution kernel with a width of 15 days and unity integral).
    • We sum up your points within a week (Monday to Sunday) and clamp to the maximum 1.5 points per week.
    • Test your understanding of antialiasing: why might it be more stressful for you as a student if we did not do this?
  • We will try to maintain a regularly updated public record of your participation; this is meant for visibility, not to stress you out!

A Reminder on “Meaningful Comments” Online

  • Examples of meaningful comments: https://cs184.eecs.berkeley.edu/sp19/lecture/1-82/introduction
  • Our overarching goal is to build an intellectual community conversation around lecture slides to ask questions, clarify, debate and expand on the material, to enrich the material for collective learning. Think of it as an annotated online textbook, where the slide comments can help you in learning concepts, implementing assignments, and studying for exams.
  • Please remember this is an academic platform! Be respectful, thoughtful, and intellectually engaged.
  • We encourage comments such as thoughtful questions about something you didn’t understand, clarifications or alternative derivations that you think may help your classmates, or sharing relevant outside resources that enrich what what is presented in the lecture.
  • Instead of: “Whoa, this is cool!”, Try: “Whoa, this fur rendering model is cool! It was actually used in “War for Planet of the Apes” for the first time. Here’s a write-up from the developers that explains...”
  • Instead of: “Can someone explain this?”, Try: “I’m not sure how we got the final result here. I understand that blah blah blah, but I thought that blah blah blah.”
  • Staff will ask questions on lecture slides that are meant to spark discussion and answer questions that go unaddressed, but we are hoping most discussion happens between students! We may occasionally make constructive requests to expand on your comment if we feel that is appropriate.

Markdown syntax & LaTeX

Markdown is simple language for formatting text. Comments on lecture slides can use Markdown features to enhance the comment with emphasis and links. You can learn more about Markdown on Wikipedia or this syntax introduction page.

Additionally, it is possible to add LaTeX style math formulas into your comments. To insert an inline formula (where the formula flows with the surrounding sentence, such as thisthis), wrap the formula in the dollar sign ($) symbol: $ your_formula_here $.

For a bigger formula on a newline and horizontally centered, use two dollar sign symbols around your formula: $$ your_formula_here $$.