Your Code Journal is collected at the end of each unit, and the milestone entry you write in class that day is the one read against the criteria. Run this check while you write it. It is the same lens I read with, so anything you catch here is something we never need to have a conversation about.
The check
Coverage
- The milestone entry reaches across the whole unit, not only the last week of it
- The moments it cites were written down on the day they happened, not reconstructed this morning — reconstructed entries always show
- All four prompts appear across the unit: what I built, what I decided, what broke, what I would try next
- At least one entry includes a real artifact — a pasted traceback, a diff, a code fragment from the day
Quality
- Every bug is located, not just felt: “empty list, two frames below my file”, not “it was being weird” (see What a Strong Entry Looks Like)
- At least one entry records something that genuinely broke or confused me, not only the parts that went well
- Help is credited where it happened: a classmate, a forum, an AI assistant, exactly as Our Classroom Norms asks
Decisions
- At least one design decision this unit is written down with the alternatives I rejected and one sentence of reasoning
- At least one decision names the condition that would change my mind — what would have to be true for the other option to win
- Where a measurement settled an argument, the numbers are in the entry, not just the conclusion
Team and inherited code
- My own contribution is named rather than hidden inside “we” — what I wrote, tested, reviewed, or fixed
- What I wrote matches what the history shows; a reader could check one against the other
- At least one entry records what a review changed — mine of somebody else’s code, or theirs of mine
- At least one entry records something I learned from code I did not write, and the technique that got me there
Growth and the people at the end of it
- Each entry ends with one concrete “what I would try next”
- At least one earlier “try next” turns up later as a thing I actually tried, with a sentence about how it went
- Anything the community partner asked to keep private stays out of the journal, or goes in without names
The checkable claim is the whole game
Anyone can write “I contributed a lot to the project.” The journal becomes evidence the day an entry says “I wrote the queue class on Tuesday, Priya’s review caught that it silently dropped the last item, and the fix is the commit from Thursday morning.” That sentence can be checked against the repository in ten seconds, which is exactly why it counts — see How Marks Work.