Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

Pros:

The content is interesting

The lectures are really valid from a content perspective

TAs are supportive most of the time

Teachers are supportive and welcoming during office hours

The quizzes are "ok". Some of the questions are "confusing", but I wouldn't complain too much about that.

Cons:

The course is badly organized. There's little room to plan ahead. The course will be unlocked after the first week. On Canvas you'll see everything due for December 1st, however the real deadlines are different. This might cause some confusion.

There are neither notes/written versions of the lectures, nor you can download the videos; usually I wouldn't complain, however I want to mention that on Canvas the video player is awfully small. Not sure if this is an issue for most of the people, it was for me.

Individual assignments and Group Project are the worst part:

There are two individual assignments. I won't share too much detail on the assignment itself, but I want to complain about the way it's proposed.

We were given the assignment description and a template. The real issue is that the assignment description and the template differ on some points. Clearly one of the two wasn't updated but they still expected you to follow both, since the grading of the paper really depends from it. Let me give you an example without giving too much detail about the assignment itself.

Assignment description: go from A to B and print the number of seconds you took to go from A to B. Print the value on a chart. Then go from point B to point A walking backwards.

Template description: go from point A to point B. Then print the result, then print the chart. Then repeat the steps, print the value, print the chart. Compare the two charts.

Grading description (available only when the TAs evaluate your submission) will loosely match the template description, but not at 100%.

However, following both points is confusing, especially because the assignments description don't match at 100% and TAs have to give extra information, for example by saying which task has to be excluded from the submission. Why couldn't they just write an assignment that includes everything?

Unexpectedly, the second assignment is incredibly well written and the requirements are clear.

If you already took HCI, there's a lot of overlap with some core concepts and, in my opinion, most of that content is better covered by Dr. Joyner's class, at least from an organization and material standpoint.

I understand that some people might be interested in taking this course rather than HCI, but I have to consider that this is a core course for the HCI specialization, so the overlap is almost certain in case you enrolled in this specialization.

The poor course organization reflects into parts of assignments being postponed and/or canceled. Is not a bad thing, but it really gives you little room for planning ahead.

There are few mismatches between Canvas grades and what's written on the syllabus, this is not really clear, my team and I might just be wrong, but it appears so.

Up until now is the worst course I've taken. I don't know if I've been spoiled by the quality of previous classes, especially Dr. Joyner's, but is a fair course that's make awful by the lack of organization. Teachers and TAs try to make up for this by being really flexible and supportive, but wouldn't it be just simpler to reorganize the course for good?

TL;DR Version

Interesting content and solid lectures, with supportive instructors and TAs. However, the course is very poorly organized. Deadlines are unclear, materials don’t match (assignment descriptions vs templates vs grading), and planning ahead is nearly impossible. There are no written notes, the video player is tiny, and some quiz questions are confusing, not to increase the difficulty of the course, just badly written. Individual assignments and the group project suffer the most from inconsistencies and last-minute changes. Compared to other classes, the overall structure and clarity are significantly weaker. Instructors try to compensate with flexibility, but the course urgently needs a proper reorganization.

I really enjoyed this class. I came in having zero expectations with a "this is just another class to take" attitude and came out quite surprised. The material covered, while seemingly dated, was rather fascinating. The experiment assignments that we needed to conduct and manipulate data into something usable was very fun and enlightening.

The only weird con of this class was some disorganization with soft and hard deadlines. But I hear that stuff is being worked out.

Overall, I'm quite happy about this class. Thomas Ploetz was fantastic.

MUC is taught by a different professor each semester, so you may have a very different experience, depending on when you take it. This semester, the professor was Thomas Ploetz.

This was my 6th course in OMSCS. I came in with very low expectations and only took this class for the HCI spec. However, it was not as bad as people made it out to be; it is still rough around the edges but has clearly undergone some improvements. Overall, it is an easy B and somewhat insecure A. I will likely end up with an A.

Assignments:

• Sensor Data individual assignment (formerly a group assignment)
• Arduino individual assignment (formerly a group assignment)
• Weekly open-book exercises and quizzes based on lectures/readings
• Final (open-book this semester, but likely closed-book in the future)
• Open-ended group project (involving a proposal, a teaser video, a halftime report & video update, a final project demo video, a project report, two peer review sessions, and weekly check-ins with your assigned TA mentor).

Pros:

• The syllabus was released at the beginning of the semester. I know this is a low bar to clear, but this class has apparently failed to clear this bar in the past.
• Prof. Ploetz and the TAs (esp. the head TA) were responsive in the forum. The other TAs would make an appearance from time to time as well. Most questions received an answer within 24 hours.
• Grades and feedback were released at a reasonable cadence.
• All reading and lecture-based assessments were open-book. As I state above, it is possible the final will be closed-book in the future.
• The Sensor Data and Arduino assignments were changed to individual assignments.
• The Arduino assignment was pretty fun (if basic).
• The group project was open-ended. You can take one of their (also open-ended) suggestions and run with it or explore your own idea; all you have to do is connect it with MUC principles, and you are good to go. You can make a game, create a mobile app, do an Arduino project, do a replication study--it all works as long as you can justify the project idea.   The Bad:
• Assignment instructions, specs, and due dates would change mid-week, and you had to keep a close eye on the discussion board to keep track of these updates.
• In keeping with the mid-week assignment changes, the teaching team also contemplated changing the exam from an open-book exam to a closed-book exam 1 to 1.5 weeks before it was scheduled. They eventually decided to leave it as an open-book exam this semester, but I suspect it will be closed-book in the future.
• Project feedback was sometimes vague and not always actionable. This may be TA-specific though.
• You will spend way more time writing than coding during the group project. All the deliverables are videos or reports, and the TA probably won't look at a single line of your final project code even if you submit it.
• The teaching team explicitly forbade us from reusing proposal material for the final report. This means that you will be stuck wasting time rehashing a lot of your proposal for the final project but using different words. Process is agonizing and will feel like a waste of time.

Suggestions:

• Keep a very close eye on the forums for assignment updates.
• Form your group near the start of the semester but after add/drop period.
• Get 1-2 group members who are not averse to academic writing and research. As mentioned above, all the major deliverables for the project are written or video deliverables.
• Shoot for underambitious rather than overambitious for the group project. You may get docked points for lack of vision, but it's way better than having to scramble to finish your project; the TAs will assess you based on the goals you set for yourself in the original project proposal, so it is important to set clear expectations. Even if you go for an underambitious project, the instructional team ultimately just wants to see that you can finish what you said you'd finish and that you put some decent work into it. You shouldn't get under a B so long as you don't do something stupid like plagiarize.

Looks like this mod has been a shitshow for a long time looking at the reviews and it has not gotten better since.

For my semster there are two types of deadlines in Canvas ( hard deadline, soft deadline ) .

I liked that it was broken up into phases but everything just felt very poorly organized.

The deadlines kept getting changed and also each milestone for the project was locked and only released with one week to work on it. Everything was very vague and have to dig out key information in the ed forum, for example the page limit for an assignment is not mentioned anywhere in the assignment page, but only as a post in Ed.

There are also peer reviews but it was done it a very weird format. I had taken HCI and peerfeedback was excellent.

There are also many synchronous events like meetings with TA which was difficult for teams in different regions.

Workload is manageable but this lack of planning by the teaching team makes it really hard to work on projects

This is a core mod for HCI spec, so those who are forced to take it have to slug through it, but if you can i would avoid this mod like the plague, this was the worst mod i have taken in OMSCS by far

Overall the contents of the projects were good, and the final project is one where you'll get as much out of it as you put in. Lots of potential to just play around and make something cool. But the way the assignments are written and conveyed are very poor. Lots of inconsistences among various versions of the same assignment description (e.g. canvas and word doc w/ the assignment not matching up). The main purpose of the forum for this class seemed to be to clarify questions on things like this.

Additionally some deadlines and assignments were only published a few days before they were due. For example we knew some peer discussion needed to happen on the forum in the space of a 24 hour window, but the description of how that would actually work was only posted three days beforehand. It felt like the instructors were only figuring it out themselves a few days ahead of time. Lots of "we'll get back to you with an answer on this once we've convened" sorts of responses.

All in all the course wasn't bad or particularly hard, aside from these logistical annoyances that could be solved if someone just looked over everything for a single day before the class started. FWIW the instructor and TA's were very responsive on the forum and clearly care, so i just wish more of that care could be taken up front instead of feeling like the railroad tracks are constantly only being laid out 10 feet in front of the train.

This was my 6th course and it was by far and away the worst one. It may be the worst course I have taken in undergrad and grad school. It's not that hard, I got an A, but it was just a pain in the ass to deal with.

The lecture videos have some good content, as do the readings, so this course has a lot of potential! The quizzes on lecture materials are busy work with dumb questions that are difficult to answer unless you wrote everything from every video down. I would argue the answers they claimed were correct for their HCI design principle questions were completely wrong (I loved HCI and did very well in it), but let's not get petty...

They had a smaller group assignment up on Canvas for 4 weeks, which our group completed, and then decided to randomly cancel it with on clear reason? Good stuff.

Every part of the larger group project was so unclear. When are things due, what is due. They clearly took everything from the in-person class and forgot to tailor it to the online class. The group project was so open ended that I think a lot of people were confused about requirements. I like it being open ended but not if it means we're not going to be unsure if we can get an A for our project the entire semester.

They took so long to grade initial deliverables on the project that you couldn't quickly evaluate whether you were on the right path or not either. Due dates were constantly changing, feedback took so long that turnaround time on other parts of the assignment weren't appropriate. What's the difference between the deliverable in November and December? I can go on and on. If only you could see the messages on Ed Discussion (both how ridiculous the messages from staff were and how much confusion there was from fellow students). Pathetic organization for a class. Really bad.

As a OMSCS Reddit post about this class asked early on in the semester: "Is this a social experiment?"

All that said, I did get an A. I didn't spend that much time on it. You will get through it. Just expect it to suck. HCI specialization deserves better.

This course at Georgia Tech was an absolute disaster and by far the worst experience of my academic career. The TAs and professor were completely incompetent, incapable of running a class, and utterly disorganized. There was no direction, no clarity on deadlines, and no functional syllabus. It took half the course to even produce a syllabus, and when they finally did, it was a complete joke—useless and poorly put together.

The projects were meaningless and had zero relevance to anything. To make matters worse, grades were delayed by months. In our group, people who had dropped the course submitted work, and then months later, my grade was penalized because the assignments were “no longer accessible” to the TAs. No kidding! You took so long to grade the work that it’s no longer available. The complete lack of professionalism and accountability in this course is astonishing. It’s a perfect example of how not to run a class.

This was probably the worst class I have ever taken in any level of my education. It was an absolute clown show throughout. The syllabus wasn't out for several weeks after the class had started and due dates were never really finalized and changed on a whim. Answers from the TAs regarding course assignments were both slow and inconsistent. The group project was a mess, as always, with the groups being made and revised no fewer than 3 times. The starter code for our project wasn't given to us until weeks after the project started. This caused us to have to rush and spit something out in the little time we were given. Despite our project being garbage we still received a 100. All of the assignments were graded with such leniency (90+ mean on all assignments) that it makes me wonder why they even bothered giving grades.

At least it was an easy A I guess.

Copied and pasted from CIOS below. It's pretty unfortunate that it looks like nothing has changed from this course in the past year, as I was reading through other reviews from last year and kept saying "Yep, sounds about right." Unless Thad makes some major changes to how the group project is run and gets rid of all the pointless "did you pay attention in lecture" exercises, this class is really the worst class in OMSCS I have taken (I am now 7 classes in). There is a LOT of great material in the lectures, and a lot of good start to assignments in the group assignments we did with Sensor Analysis and Arduino. However, these are basically intro assignments and pretty easy. Let's get into making these a bit harder, don't be afraid to give grad students grad student level work. Get it up to 4 of them (honestly the group assignments we did should have been a single assignment and completed with real accel/gyro data using arduino), and make the assignments individual. Get rid of all the needless participation exercises in lecture, and spread the group project through the whole semester with required meetings with your TA for approval for things BEFORE you go out, write an entire proposal, and get a C on it and freak students out the rest of the semester. This is how tasks in the working world operate, not communicating through a vague list of instructions that look as though they were written for someone else. You have meetings with your manager on what you need to do, get buy in from folks, etc. Idk what else to say here, but hopefully this paints a good picture of the perception of the course from the student side of things. This could be an AWESOME course, talk to the Video Game Design staff and see how they run things. I took that class in a summer and it was so much better.

CIOS review:

It felt like the online section of this course was completely detached from the lectures and our grade is a complete toss-up. Our group assignments went fine, and the group project was ultimately okay in the end. However, it was very clear to us as students that the teaching staff was not well trained on what the expectations for our assignments would be, and the grades on several assignments reflected that. Also, there was so much of our grade that depended on our group project, and we got little to no guidance on it aside from a page of instructions. We got lots of last minute clarifications from our TA's which in all fairness, was appreciated, but where was this clarification when the assignment started? My understanding is that the staff decided to frontload individual work and backload the group work. This clearly needs some tuning, as the group work felt completely disjointed even with our group meeting regularly, completing work, trying to understand requirements, etc. My suggestion is to take a page out of Video Game Design's course structure. I completed just as many lectures and participated more actively in the Ed discussions. And at the end of the day, our group was far more successful in our semester project and we were very confident on what we had to complete and submit. Any deliverable for this class as a group for our project, we spent an hour trying to figure out what we had to even complete in the first place.

I will say, our TA did make a strong effort to answer questions on the Ed forums, and even reached out to our group personally to offer extended assistance if needed (we weren't able to take advantage of it because of timing). Lots of answers turned back to, "I need to check back with the teaching staff" so I think since you had a good active TA, the problem came from the instructor staff and not the TA staff. The head TA was also very active and often clarified instructions, though it often conflicted with what the instructors had written on Canvas. Clearly this was very disorganized, and it feels like the TA staff was ready to run the course, but the instructors/course design was just not there. Ultimately, that led to the course being unsuccessful.

Tldr; course material was very strong and interesting, group assignments were okay and I wish we had more work like it as individual work as it was very little/easy, too much lecture quiz "make sure they paid attention" nonsense which was unneeded and did not contribute to my understanding of the material, exam felt fair (I got a 79, could've tried a bit harder for a B/A) for my understanding of the material, the group project was a complete dumpster fire as we had deliverables nearly every week which made no sense and were poorly structured with little room for improvements between feedback being received from our TAs. Ultimately, we made a cool project with a strong codebase and foundation in the course material, but that doesn't mean we will get a good grade which is unfortunate because we had no idea what to submit. This alone makes me unable to recommend the course in its current state.