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What I'm really afraid of with giving too much structure and templates, especially nowadays, is that you just put it into ChatGPT and then you say 'do it' and then the more you give the structure, the more it's like accurate.

[...] to allow the students to grow in different directions. So it gives you this customizability, right? Like a student maybe wants to learn more about, I don't know, game physics. [...] Then you allow them to, with the bonuses, you allow them to do a new concept, create it from scratch. And then you have another student that just wants to do the typical power up, they don't care so much about this aspect. Then again they have the freedom.

The more you make it critical and open, the more you learn about genuinely [...] what the student learned.

I feel like it's a good strategy for a first year course, first study period, because imagine now if I did completely open, students would be completely lost, right?

That's where it [openness] collides with having structure to check things, right? To do unit testing or ...

The structure is really good, because we always have support from the TAs. That's really helpful, or else, when you have 100 students, it's really hard to manage.

About the grading, in general, I don't have many complaints.

My opinion about rubrics is, like, it's okay, but at some point it's too much. [...] They're there to advise you and they're not really there to check boxes and you know, like, they should be treated that way.

We're trying to see if they understood the main concepts, like for-loops, recursion, inheritance, [...] up to interfaces and abstract classes.

The variable names are very cryptic. One-letter variable names should be avoided, except for counters in for-loops.

You make logical use of member variables, method parameters, and/or properties to give objects/classes access to each other.

You've added fun extras that required challenging programming.

For the grade you give a number based on your overall impression. You also assess individual parts, but you don't give partial grades that somehow add up to a final grade.

I guess the point there is that you don't just add up all these small pieces and then you're just reaching a passing grade. Because a student could do tiny things that are not really showing that they learned about he objectives of the assignment and then they can get a passing grade. [...] I think the phrase basically tries to avoid that.

The rubrics are not really used at that point. [...] I don't have the students going through, you know, with a letter in front of them or something.