Question

I’m going to be teaching a scripting and tool development class to a group of 3D animators. In amongst teaching them coding fundamentals, I plan to have them pick a repetitive task they must perform frequently and have them iteratively develop a tool to automate or simplify this task as an assignment.

What I’d like to know are some criteria that can be used for grading programming assignments such as these? Some of the criteria I came up with were:

Does It Work – Does the tool perform it’s task, does it break on certain cases, etc.

Code Cleanliness – Has the code been properly indented, is their coding style consistent, etc.

Documentation – Are functions well documented, are any “clever” bits of code commented, is it under-commented or over-commented, etc.

Efficiency – Has the script been optimized to run quickly, has a lot of unnecessary optimization been done on a task that isn’t run very often, etc. (This one I’m not going to put to much emphasis on since these aren’t professionally developed tools usually the tool working is more important than speed)

Are there any others?

Answer 1

Clarity. It’s important that their code be comprehensible to anyone competent who should chance to open the file.