Graded projects
Every brief here belongs to a course — it is the work you hand in at the end of one, marked against the checklist below it. You read that checklist before you start, so you always know what you are aiming at, and starting a brief starts the course that gets you to it.
One line of one real checklist
The news comes first
The difficult part is in the opening, not buried after context.
- The reader must reach the third paragraph to learn what happened.
- Present in the first paragraph but softened into ambiguity.
- The first sentence states the news plainly.
- States it plainly and immediately follows with what happens next.
Pick something you would really have to do
Business Writing & Communication
- Get £8,000 of unbudgeted spend approvedWrite a one-page memo asking a finance director you have never met to approve £8,000 that is not in the budget. They will read it between two other…
- Tell them the deadline is slippingA commitment you made will slip by two weeks. You have known for three days. Write the message to the person who is depending on it. The hard part is…
- Summarise something long, without losing the bad newsTake a real document of at least 1,500 words — a report, a proposal, a post-mortem — and compress it to 150 words that stand alone. The test is not…
Home Cooking
- Four cuts, one vegetableTake one vegetable and cut it four ways — dice, slice, julienne, and a rough chop for something that will be blended. Photograph each pile. What is…
- Cook something to a target and prove you hit itCook one substantial thing — a piece of meat, a thick fish fillet, a halloumi steak, a large mushroom — to a doneness you state *before* you start…
- Cook from what you have, with no recipePhotograph what is in your kitchen. Then cook a dish from it without looking up a recipe, and write down what you decided as you went. This is the…
Personal Finance & Investing
- A position statement that reconcilesProduce a net-worth statement and a monthly cashflow — for yourself, or for a fictional person you invent and describe. Either is fine; the marking…
- A projection that states what it rests onBuild a long-horizon projection — a savings goal, a repayment schedule, or a retirement figure. Show the working. Two things separate a real…
- Break your own plan on purposeTake the projection from the previous project, or any plan that currently works on its central assumptions, and find the point where it stops…
Photography
- Take control of exposurePhotograph one subject four times: correctly exposed, deliberately one stop under, deliberately one stop over, and once in a scene where the meter…
- A portrait with one light you choseMake a portrait using a single light source — a window counts — where you chose the direction and the quality on purpose, and can say why. Focus…
- Six frames that belong togetherShoot and edit six frames, in changing light, that read as one body of work rather than six separate photographs. This is the skill that separates a…
Python Fundamentals
- Fix a bug, and prove it stays fixedA cleanup routine is supposed to remove every expired item from a list, and users report that some expired items survive. The code removes items from…
- A small tool someone else could extendWrite a small tool that turns a list of records into a fixed-width text report: a header, one line per record, and a totals line at the bottom…
- Summarise a file that is not cleanYou are given a CSV of orders with columns `id`, `customer`, `amount`. About one row in fifty is unusable — a missing amount, a stray header repeated…
SQL & Data Analysis
- Audit a table you have been told to trustYou have inherited a `customers` table that a downstream team relies on. Audit it and report what is wrong: duplicate identities, orphaned foreign…
- Revenue by channel, without double-countingYou have `orders`, `order_items`, `customers` and `channels`. Produce monthly revenue by acquisition channel for the last 12 months, including…
- Monthly cohort retention from a raw event logFrom a single `events(user_id, event_name, occurred_at)` table, build a monthly cohort retention table. Rows are signup month, columns are months…
- Make a slow query fast without changing its answerA dashboard query takes 40 seconds. Read its plan, work out why, and make it fast. The only hard constraint is that the result set must be…
Statistics & Data Literacy
- Redraw a chart that tells the truth and misleads anywayFind a published chart whose numbers are correct and whose construction does the arguing — a truncated axis, a dual axis, a cumulative total shown as…
- Report a messy number to someone who will act on itYou are given, or can find, a distribution that is genuinely awkward — skewed, small, or with a long tail. Salaries, delivery times, response times…
- Take apart a number someone is about to act onFind a data-backed claim that is currently being used to justify a decision — from your own organisation, a public report, or a news story with the…