Activity Clusters 1–5 — What to Do, Week by Week

Read this first, because the shape of the course is unusual

There is no examination. All 100 marks are internal, and they are awarded activity by activity, in the week the activity falls.

The syllabus is explicit: "Marks given against each activity should be awarded fully if the students successfully complete the activity."

That single sentence is the most important thing on this page. It means every activity is all-or-nothing, and doing it is the whole requirement. You are not being marked on brilliance. Turn the thing in, and the marks are yours.

It also means the reverse: a missed activity cannot be recovered. There is no revision, no supplementary, no last-minute effort that brings back week 3.

The two mandatory items that are not marks

Portfolio — a file containing every report and textual material you produce. Journal — your running record of the activities you undertook.

"Portfolio and journal are mandatory requirements for passing the course, in addition to the minimum marks required."

You can score the marks and still fail without them. Start both in week 1, add to them the same day as each activity, and you will never have to reconstruct anything.

And one thing almost nobody realises in Semester 1: the portfolio and journal are carried forward to the Semester 7 Seminar, where you present them as experience-sharing. What you file this month is opened again in three years. That is a reason to file the real thing rather than a page assembled the night before.

Marks in this group of activities

Cluster 4 alone is worth 17 marks — more than any other single cluster in the course, and more than the whole of the language work. Give it the time it deserves.

Cluster 1 — group and plan (week 1, 2 marks)

1.1 Group formation, 4 to 6 members, and self-introduction. You stay in this group all semester, so it matters more than it feels like in week 1.

1.2 Familiarise yourselves with the activity list and prepare a time plan.

1.3 Prepare a Gantt chart from the time plan. This is the only marked item in the cluster (2 marks).

What a Gantt chart is, since you will be asked for one again in project work and in industry: activities down the left, weeks across the top, and a horizontal bar for each activity spanning the weeks it occupies. Bars that overlap show work happening in parallel.

Build it in a shared online tool — Google Sheets is enough, and the syllabus explicitly expects online collaboration tools. Cluster 11.5 later asks you to present on your experience of using them and on whether you kept to this chart, so an honest chart you actually update is worth more than a tidy one you never open again.

Cluster 2 — self-awareness and goals (weeks 1–2, 10 marks)

2.1 (2) Take an online personality development test, reflect, and report. Any reputable free instrument is fine. The marks are for the reflection, not the result — write what the result did and did not match in your own experience.

2.2 (2) Role-storming exercise 1. Write about yourself from someone else's point of view — two roles: (i) your parent, guardian or mentor, and (ii) your friend, sibling or cousin. Under each, cover: strengths, areas for improvement, concerns, areas where you hesitate to take advice, and goals or expectations.

Role-storming means adopting an assumed identity to loosen your own assumptions. Written as yourself, this exercise produces a bland list. Written as your mother, it produces the concerns you have been avoiding. That is the point of the technique, and it only works if you commit to the role.

2.3 (2) Role-storming exercise 2. Now take the role of your teacher and write about the skills required of a B.Tech graduate, and the attitudes, habits and approaches you should practise during the four years to reach your goals.

2.4 (2) Discuss the identified skills within your group and improve the list together.

2.5 (2) Prepare a mind map of the role-storming output and present it in class. A mind map is radial: central idea in the middle, main branches outward, sub-branches from those. Handwritten is acceptable; keep it or a photograph of it for the portfolio.

Cluster 3 — empathy (weeks 2–4, 2 marks)

A presentation on instances of empathy you have observed — in your own life or in someone else's.

Empathy is understanding and sharing another person's feelings, and it is distinct from sympathy, which is feeling for someone from outside their situation. A specific remembered incident is worth far more here than a definition, because the activity is testing whether you can recognise it, not define it.

Cluster 4 — the workplace cluster (weeks 3–5, 17 marks)

Start this in week 3, not week 5. It depends on other people replying to you, and that is the part students misjudge.

4.1 (2) Connect with a minimum of three professionals from industry, the public sector, an NGO, another agency or academia — at least one through LinkedIn. (Create the profile now; it is separately worth 2 marks under 6.1 and is due in week 1 anyway.)

4.2 (4) Interview them and document: the workplace skills required, their work experience, what they did to improve their employability during their own B.Tech years, and their suggestions for you.

How to actually get three replies, since this is where the cluster succeeds or fails:

• Ask the people around you first. Relatives, family friends, seniors two or three years ahead, alumni of your school. A warm introduction is answered; a cold message from a stranger often is not.
• On LinkedIn, always add a note to the connection request. Say who you are, which college, and that you are a first-year student with a course activity requiring a short conversation. Specific and brief gets replies; "I'd like to add you to my network" does not.
• Ask for fifteen minutes, and mean it.
• Send five or six requests, not three. Some will not reply, and that is normal rather than personal.
• Send a thank-you afterwards. It costs a line and it is the reason the contact is still useful to you in Semester 7.

4.3 (2) Discuss within the group, compile everyone's inputs, and prepare minutes of the discussion — date, attendees, points discussed, decisions, actions.

4.4 (3) Group report from the discussions.

4.5 (4) A role-play in class based on the workplace dynamics you learned about. Four marks for a performance, so rehearse it once.

4.6 (2) Identify your own goal and prepare an action plan for your undergraduate journey. Make it concrete enough to check against: what, by when, and how you will know.

Cluster 5 — problem solving (weeks 6–7, 11 marks)

5.1 (2) As a group, select a real-life problem needing a technical solution and list the study materials required.

Choose something local and specific. Waterlogging on a particular road, queue management at your college office, waste segregation in a hostel. A problem you can observe beats a problem you have only read about, because 5.4 will require you to have opinions about it.

5.2 (2) Each member listens to a different TED talk or university video lecture related to the problem and writes a one-page summary. Different resources per member is a stated requirement.

5.3 (2) Use an online tech forum to gather ideas. Stack Overflow, Reddit's engineering communities, a domain-specific forum. Screenshot the thread for the portfolio.

5.4 (3) Arrive at a solution using the six thinking hats exercise. De Bono's method separates modes of thinking so that a group does one kind at a time instead of arguing across modes:

Run it properly: the whole group wears the same hat at once and moves through them together. The usual failure is one member permanently in the black hat while another is permanently in the green — which is just an argument with a diagram attached. Give each hat a fixed few minutes, and let the blue hat keep time.

5.5 (2) Report on the problem-solving experience.

The habit that makes this course easy

Write it up the same day, and file it immediately.

Every one of these activities produces a document, and all of them go into the portfolio. Done weekly it is perhaps twenty minutes a week. Done in week 12 it is impossible, because half the material — the discussion you had, the reply you received, the chart you meant to update — no longer exists to be recovered.