Projects

COMP 536

Author

Anna Rosen

Published

April 22, 2026

NoteHow to use this section

This section is the public hub for the course-wide project contract. Use it to find the official rubric, the final project pages, and the shared expectations that cut across assignments. Short Project 1 through Project 4 still live in the Short Projects section.

ImportantOfficial course-wide rubric

For the grading philosophy that applies across projects, start with the Official Project Rubric & Grading Scheme.

Project Philosophy

Projects in COMP 536 are not only about getting code to run. They are where you practice the course workflow: turning a scientific question into a reproducible computational instrument, validating that instrument, and communicating what the results mean.

Across the semester, the expectations stay consistent:

  • build something that works,
  • show evidence that it works,
  • organize it so another person can run and inspect it,
  • explain the scientific meaning of the result clearly.

Short Projects

The four short projects build the habits and components that feed the final project:

Final Project

The final project synthesizes the course into one longer piece of work: a JAX N-body simulator plus a surrogate emulator built on top of simulation outputs, together with a formal scientific report and a final reflective synthesis.

What Carries Forward

The final project still uses the same core standards you practiced in the short projects:

  • reproducible command-line execution,
  • readable repo structure and documentation,
  • validation against known behavior or sanity checks,
  • figures that support scientific claims rather than decorate them.

What changes is scope. The final project gives you more room to make design decisions, justify tradeoffs, and defend your verification strategy.

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