Debugging Field Notes

Four short, staged entries across Weeks 1–4 — the transition from guided practice to graded investigation, on systems small enough to read in full.

Due: 19 March 2027 · Weight: 15%

Observe precisely, hypothesise a cause you could be wrong about, and show your work before you know whether you were right.

This is the semester’s first graded work, and it is deliberately low-risk: four short entries, one per week, each tied to that week’s specific skill — observation, hypothesis and disconfirmation, structural reading, runtime evidence. None of the systems involved is large enough to hide behind.

The mark does not reward reaching a correct answer by any route. A hypothesis that was never actually falsifiable, or a disconfirming test written up after the result was already known, scores lower than an entry that commits to a test, runs it, and reports that the test refuted the original guess.

What you submit#

Four entries, one after each of Weeks 1–4, each recording the observation, hypothesis, disconfirming test, evidence, and — where relevant — an intervention and its verification, in that order. The order is the point: an entry is judged partly on whether its own internal chronology could have happened the way it claims.

How it’s marked#

Early weighting sits on observation, hypothesis formation, and genuine disconfirmation, rather than on the later stages of the cycle — those matter more once Assessments 2–4 raise the stakes on them.