Bonus Points Rewards Program

Help others and help yourself. Bonus points!

1 What?

Bonus points are available for doing anything that, in the staff’s opinion, is Awesome. What’s Awesome? A good guideline is the Three Laws of Bonusotics:

1. A bonus-point accumulating activity (BPAA) goes above and beyond the standard expectations of the course.
2. A BPAA contributes to the learning of the student who did it without detracting from others’ learning and preferably contributes to the entire class’s learning. “Learning” is broadly defined.
3. There is no other Law, but there have to be Three Laws.

The course staff has sole discretion over whether an activity qualifies for bonus points and how many to award. To calibrate, we will usually award one bonus point at a time and won’t award more than 4 at a time without national news coverage.

2 Examples

1. Posting on [Piazza] about an interesting connection between course material and general current events, or an interesting update on or application of Haskell, Prolog, functional programming, or logic programming in the news.
2. Posting something especially scintillating on the discussion board, particularly if it gains acclaim from your peers.
3. Following up on an open question raised during class (by searching the literature, designing an illustrative program, performing experiments, etc.) and posting a summary of the results.
4. Posting an insightful and entertaining parody version of a popular song that centres around functional/logic programming concepts. (E.g., for inspiration, Depeche Module’s Enjoy the Soundness (yeah.. that a PS file).)
5. Establishing a weekly, open 312 study period by setting up a Zoom room or the like and posting an open invitation on Piazza.
6. Brilliantly extending the Haskell Typeclassopedia.
7. Anything else the course staff deem worthy.

3 Why?

Well, besides being good for you (like spinach), bonus points lead to the following fabulous rewards¹:

• For every power of two you reach in bonus points (starting with 1), we will shift 1% point of weight from the category with your lowest grade to the category with your highest grade. (Bonus points and best/worst category are calculated per student.)
• Upon earning your fourth bonus point, you are declared to have a “Haskelly Habit” and receive a mildly amusing piece of schlock.
• Upon earning your eigth bonus point, you are declared to deserve a “Professional Prologue” and get a Cameo-style video of that prologue from the course staff member of your choice (as long as that choice is Steve or another staff member willing to accede to this ridiculousness). Content is subject to Rachel’s veto.

Finally, the class as a whole will also accumulate rewards. For every bonus point you accumulate, we will donate $1 (to a maximum of $512) in the class’s name to Engineers Without Borders, who are also quite used to bewildering language diversity. (Donation will occur as a unit near the end of the term.)