INFO 494 (Winter '26): Wordplay

Welcome to the INFO 494 Justice-Centered Educational Programming Languages course website!

While you are signed up for credit, this is not really a course. It's an open-source community, led by youth and teachers. This course credit reflects the contributions you'll make to the project, and the feedback, guidance, and teaching I'll do to help you learn and contribute.

Because of this, we'll use this Canvas site a bit differently from most courses:

• This is for assignment submissions only. This Canvas site a shell for capturing evidence of your contributions for credit. Nearly all of the important documentation for how to participate is on the Wordplay GitHub wiki. And all of our communication and announcements will be on the Wordplay Discord, in the #announcements channel under the "contributors" channel group. You'll really only come here to submit things for credit and I'll only come here to assess and assign points. Everything else happens during our meetups and asynchronously on GitHub and Discord.
• You'll choose which assignments you complete. There are many ways to get credit for your contributions to the project and no one correct path. You'll decide what to learn and what to contribute. There's no such thing as "getting all of the points" in this research studio. Instead, think of it like "do enough valuable things to earn credit".
• You can repeat it! You can register for up to 16 credits of the course, participating multiple quarters over multiple years, becoming an ongoing part of the open source community.

📆 schedule your work

Because this is 2 credits, I expect you to spend roughly 6 hours per week, and 60-70 hours total contributing to the project. This requires self-regulated learning. Many students struggle to contribute enough because they prioritize other coursework over this work, then try to race at the end, and end up making low quality contributions that aren't sufficient for credit. To avoid doing that, organize your contributions like this:

• Attend meetups. Add the meetup to your calendar and come every week (1.5 hours). This is required for credit.
• Choose work times. Choose two days a week to work on Wordplay work for 2 hours each session (4 hours total), or choose one 4 hour session. Put this on your calendar and do it every week, in the same place if possible, so you can get into a rhythm of making progress.
• Get help early and often from me. Past contributors report spending 100x as long time floundering by themselves, or getting bad answers from LLMs, and then realizing far too late that they could have asked me a question and gotten a high quality answer in <1 minute. If you're afraid to ask me, post on Discord and ask the group.
• Learn together. Find someone to co-work with, pair program with, talk to me. Solo learning and work is almost always slower in software design and development. Self-organize groups as needed, pull me in frequently.

If you don't make a plan like that, trust me: procrastination will not work, and your last minute contributions will likely not be of sufficient quality to earn credit, because you will not have made time to learn, network, and get feedback.

🎬 get started

1. Read through all of the assignments available to you, to get a sense of the different things you'll need to do to get credit. Some are required for everyone, some you may choose from. If you think of some work you think would be valuable to the project, but don't see an assignment for it, message Amy in Canvas or Discord with the idea and I will create a new assignment for it.
2. Make note of the assignments that are due earlier in the quarter. These are onboarding assignments you should do right away, to orient.
3. Read the contributors page on the Wordplay GitHub wiki. It explains everything you need to know about how to get started.
4. After you've joined GitHub, make sure to change your server name to your real name, so I can give you credit for meetup posts. (See the ask Amy anything assignment for details.)

💯 get credit

Credit is pretty simple. You must do two things:

• Do enough tasks to get at least 80 points, and you will get CR (credit). Anything less and you will get NC (no credit).
• Attend at least 8 meetups and do what the ask Amy anything assignment says to do. This is partly to encourage participation, but also to help you focus on making the most of our gatherings.

Amy will grade submissions weekly.

🌟 this quarter's priorities

This quarter we are racing toward the late February start of teacher Adrienne Gifford's Wordplay unit at Open Window School! She'll have 6th and 7th grade students working on projects. Our key priorities are:

• Any issue in the supporting teaching milestone on GitHub.
• Any issue labeled a defect on GitHub.
• Test and improve the recently redesigned block-based editing functionality.
• A more polished and consistent simplified Chinese locale (#876). It needs some love!

😕 is this class not working for you?

First, I want you to know that if it isn't, that is partly my fault, partly this university's, and partly the world's. It is almost certainly not your fault, since you didn't design this class, this university, or the world. And there are so many ways that things don't work for students:

• Chronic disease can get in the way of due dates
• Our classrooms can be hard to see, hear, and listen in, or even impossible for some of you to sit comfortably in.
• My teaching might demand too much of your attention
• The pacing of this class might be too fast or too slow
• The materials I share might be inaccessible

I don't want any of those to be true, and I'm very motivated to make changes to this class if they are. If you're willing to tell me, I'm willing to partner with you to make changes, so it can work better for you, and potentially others.

A note on DRS: a lot of students don't seek DRS out, because they haven't accepted that they might be disabled in some way. I can imagine you might not write me for the same reasons. I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with being differently abled or disabled; what is wrong is classes that don't account for your abilities. DRS can be a partner in helping you sort through your needs, and I can be a partner in helping meet them. Let me know what you need.

⚖️ know your rights