Projects I'm proud of

CAP runs entirely in the browser, so there's nothing to install and nothing for your IT department to approve. You're creating ordinary LMS assignments that point students at the activity menu. Here's the whole process:

1. Skim the menu first. Open the CAP site and browse the 39 activities and the instructor resources — rubrics, tracking tools, and student outcome data are all included. Ten minutes of skimming will tell you which activity categories fit your course and your students.
2. Pick your scope. CAP works as a full exam replacement, a single-unit project, or extra credit. If you're testing the waters, start with one category — Government Meeting Attendance is the most popular first pick, and the student stories on my home page show why.
3. Create the assignment in your LMS. In Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace: new Assignment → paste the link to your chosen CAP activity in the description → set the submission type to text entry plus file upload, so students can attach photos, agendas, or documents alongside their written reflection. Set the point value to whatever the exam or assignment it replaces was worth. The stakes should feel real.
4. Attach the rubric. Use the included CAP rubric as-is, or rebuild it in your LMS's rubric tool so it grades inside SpeedGrader (or your platform's equivalent).
5. Make it yours. Everything is licensed for adaptation — swap my Fort Worth examples for your own city council, county commissioners, and school board. Local is the whole point.

TIA is the Texas Government counterpart to CAP, and it adopts exactly the same way: browser-based, nothing to install, no IT approval needed. If you already run CAP, this will feel familiar. If you're starting here, the whole process takes about half an hour:

1. Skim the menu first. Open the TIA site and browse the activities. They're built specifically around Texas institutions — the Legislature, the plural executive, county and municipal government — so students connect with the bodies that actually govern their daily lives in Texas. Ten minutes of skimming will tell you which activities map onto your GOVT 2306 units.
2. Pick your scope. TIA works as a full exam replacement, a single-unit project, or extra credit. Contacting a state representative and attending a county commissioners court meeting are the two activities students find most eye-opening — both pair naturally with the Texas legislative and local-government units.
3. Create the assignment in your LMS. In Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace: new Assignment → paste the link to your chosen TIA activity in the description → set the submission type to text entry plus file upload, so students can attach photos, agendas, or correspondence alongside their written reflection. Set the point value to whatever the exam or assignment it replaces was worth. The stakes should feel real.
4. Attach the rubric. Use the included rubric as-is, or rebuild it in your LMS's rubric tool so it grades inside SpeedGrader (or your platform's equivalent).
5. Make it local. Everything is licensed for adaptation — swap my Tarrant County and Fort Worth examples for your own county courthouse, city hall, and state legislative district. The closer to home, the better it lands.

CAP and TIA are built for government courses, but the underlying model is discipline-neutral: a menu of authentic activities, three effort tiers, a point target, checkpoints, and complete/incomplete rubrics. Nursing, business, biology, art history, and composition all translate cleanly. Here is the path:

1. Look at a finished one first. Skim the CAP menu and rubrics to see what you are aiming at. Ten minutes with a working example is worth an hour of theory.
2. Answer a short set of questions, learning goals first. The Build Your Own guide starts from true backwards design: your course learning outcomes or state objectives, then your students, the project's scope and time window, the grade weight, and your constraints. Rough answers are fine. This is the context that turns generic AI output into something that fits your real students.
3. Let the page build your prompt. Type your answers in and it assembles a complete, staged prompt — adapted to your scope and time window — that you can paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot. Free versions work. Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere — it stays in your browser.
4. Work through the five stages. The prompt makes the AI stop and check in after each stage, so you approve the skeleton before it writes the menu, and the menu before it writes the rubrics. Expect to cut or rewrite about a third of what comes back. That is the process working, not failing.
5. Run it once, then fix what breaks. Start with eight to twelve activities, not thirty-nine. My checkpoint pacing was wrong the first semester and a few activities drew no takers. Keep what worked and revise the rest.