Semester project presentations

[Elisa Beshero-Bondar]

Throughout the semester you've heard us talking about the "sibling" DH class in Pittsburgh, which covers related material to our class and where students are working on projects something like yours on a foundation of "the XML family of languages". We’ve been invited by @djbpitt , my colleague who teaches that course, to continue our tradition of sharing the spring DH classes' semester project presentations, with a combined audience of both our classes. Last year, @alnopa9, @BMT45, and @frabbitry remember when our class carpooled to Pittsburgh for those. This year, it's sadly different during our pandemic crisis, but @djbpitt and I are wondering if we can manage to connect our two classes in that week via Zoom.

One issue will be timing, because our classes are held in different parts of the day. Last year they were both running in late morning, but this year, David's class meets on MWF at 10am, and ours, of course, meets at 2pm. Would you let me know your thoughts about being able to present your project during the week of 4/13 - 4/17, at an "off" hour for us, 10am? If you have a schedule conflict with that hour, we could go back to David and see if his students might be willing to present at 2pm instead, or perhaps we can find some way to sort out the timing so they come online for one or two days during our classtime, instead? David's class is a fair bit larger than ours (they have six projects running this semester, to give you an idea), and usually we've found it easier to visit his class than to try to bring them to us, so I'll just start by asking each of you to respond and let me know:

1. Would you be able to present your project on one of the following days: M 4/13, W 4/15, or F 4/17 and listen to other presentations from the Pittsburgh students if they are running between 10 - 10:50am? (Or is this a schedule conflict?)

2. Would you be able to attend project presentations on one or two of those days at 10am? Or all three days?

This might seem strange during our virtual classroom schedule, but I can write a note to my colleagues to ask to excuse you from a class meeting for shared project presentations with the Pittsburgh class in that week. In some ways our lives can go on, and if we can do this, it's probably worthwhile!

If enough of our project teams really can't do this to share any of the presentations, we can ask David to see if his students might join us at 2pm instead. I hope we can find a way to share the presentations because usually the projects are interesting to share and mixing our students in that week is something people remember and appreciate later (I'll ask @alnopa9, @BMT45, and @frabbitry to comment). It's usually a good conversation, and it continues on our project GitHub repos as people are doing the final project preparations. Anyway, please respond here and let us know what you think.

Thanks everyone for taking a look at your calendars and giving this some thought.
@benjaminc2020 @biancamaginley @robftg @amberpeddicord @bobbyfunks @lmcneil7 @smdunn921 @Bryant-LettucePrime @ChinoyIndustries

[Elisa Beshero-Bondar]

@djbpitt At least a couple of my students are not available at 10am because they have another class scheduled at that hour. I don't have all the responses from the group yet, but I know that some are available at 10am and some are not. We could see if some projects teams are available, but we also thought it appropriate to ask if (some of) your class would be willing to join us at 2pm for our class meeting time, and perhaps we can mix up the project presentations that way, with some running in the morning on one or two days, and others running in the afternoon on another.