Final project
Trace the full mechanism chain across the semester — from the first "one more episode" pull through to the recommendation and social layers that keep a viewer inside a platform for a season, not just an evening.
Due: 10 May 2027 · Weight: 55%
The brief#
Take the mechanisms this course named one at a time, week by week, and show how they chain together into a single real session or subscription — not as twelve separate points, but as one connected argument.
Every week from 1 to 12 isolated one mechanism on purpose, holding everything else constant so it could be seen clearly. Week 12’s own lecture makes the point this project asks you to run with: a real viewing session never runs one mechanism at a time — one mechanism’s effect tends to land right where the next mechanism’s starting condition needs it to. Pick a real or realistic streaming session or subscription history and trace that chain through it: which weeks’ mechanisms are operating, in what order, and how does an earlier one set up the conditions the next one needs?
Then go one step further than description. Week 11 showed that the same interruption placed at different points in a cycle produces very different outcomes. Using that reasoning, name one specific point in the chain you traced where a small interruption would do the most good, and explain why that point beats the others you could have picked.
A strong response does what the course’s own final week does: it treats the semester as a chain, not a list. The judgement being tested is whether you can show one mechanism’s output becoming the next mechanism’s input in a concrete case — not just correctly recall twelve definitions in one document.
Weeks covered#
The final project draws on the full semester — Weeks 1 through 12, every mechanism this course has named. It is released in Week 9 and due in Week 12, but it isn’t limited to the second half of the course: it is specifically the piece of work that asks you to look back across everything, including the material from weeks already assessed in Assignment 1.
What you submit#
- The artefact — an annotated timeline or diagram of a real or realistic streaming session or subscription history, marking where each mechanism you’re tracing activates and labelling it with the week it came from.
- A written analysis — walking the chain stage by stage, showing how each mechanism’s effect creates the starting condition the next one needs, the way Week 12’s lecture does across a handful of examples.
- A closing intervention — naming one specific point in your chain where a Week-11-style interruption would have the biggest effect, and explaining why, using that week’s own reasoning about placement rather than a general appeal to willpower.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, in the format named below
- it stands on its own, without you there to explain it
- it traces at least four distinct mechanisms from across the semester, each named and tied to the week it came from
- it shows how one mechanism's effect feeds into the next one's starting condition, not just a list of unconnected observations
- it names one specific intervention from Week 11 and explains, using that week's own reasoning, why that point in the chain and not another
- the work is yours, with any assistance declared
How it is marked
Judged as a whole against the brief, with particular weight on whether the chain of mechanisms is shown connecting to itself — one week's output feeding the next week's starting condition — rather than presented as twelve separate, unconnected points, and on whether the Week 11 intervention is a specific, well-reasoned choice rather than a generic "just stop watching."