This assignment asks students to use data collected by Torn Apart to create three Python classes to track information regarding companies contracting with ICE, facilities ICE uses, and Congressional Districts with monetary ties to ICE. Using this information, students are then instructed to create functions that will find the nearest ICE facility to any given location, whether any given company that contract with ICE, and whether any given congressional district has a monetary tie to ICE. There are several accompanying readings listed in the description that are free to access online. The goal of this assignment is not to pass judgment on the companies, congressional districts, and facilities ICE interacts with, but to allow students to see how wide-reaching the monetary impacts of one federal agency can be.
This assignment asks students to create classes to store Job and Worker information for the purpose of creating hiring and firing algorithms. Students are then asked to design their own algorithms for determining who should be hired or fired by a company. This assignment is designed to be given in conjunction with a discussion of the systemic inequality built into algorithmic hiring decisions. Students are asked to decide what qualities they believe are important to consider when making these decisions, and how much these qualities should be weighed. The overall goal they should be instructed to strive for is to make "non-biased" hiring and firing algorithms. That said, what "non-biased" truly means is open for their own interpretation. Additionally, part of the assignment is for them to understand how they can start out with pure intentions and still create a biased, if not illegal, hiring or firing algorithm.
This assignment asks students to design a create your own adventure game. Drawing from the accompanying work "Videogames for Humans", specifically the section based off of the semi-famous Twine game, "Depression Quest", this assignment asks students to design an adventure game that draws from topics such as Epistemologym Ideology, Social Construction, Intersections of Gender and Computing, the Politics of Artifacts, Modularization, Systems of Education, and Macroethics vs. Microethics. By encouraging them to address these topics through their adventure, it teaches students to see how the narratives we create in games connect to real-world situations.
This assignment asks students to use data collected by the Digital Almshouse Project to create python dictionaries to track information regarding Irish Immigration in the 1920's. Using this information, students are then instructed to create functions that find various data trends. The goals of this assignment are to teach students how to use dictionaries, basic sorting, and basic indexing through the exploration of the biases, assumptions, and systems of power extant in this data.
