Morning: everything the handbook says, in about eight minutes rather than twenty pages. Afternoon: three people, one arcade game, and the part nobody warns you about — writing down what you did and why.
You're at Northern Ireland's largest FE and HE college, on a two-year course that runs September to June. The handbook covers everything. These three numbers cover most of it.
The minimum expected. Below it and you're into disciplinary territory, whatever your grades look like.
The deadline to be registered with Pearson. Miss it and your qualification is at risk before you've started.
How long you wait for feedback after an on-time submission. Late work doesn't get that guarantee.
Unreal project files are large, and they only get bigger as a project grows. Get a proper USB 3.0/3.1 drive with real capacity — 64GB minimum — not whatever's been sitting in a drawer since 2015. Back up to it every session, on top of anything you keep on {{canvas|Canvas}} or in the cloud. Systems fail; "it's gone" is still your problem, not the College's.
Coursework happens on your independent study days, not in the classroom — so it doesn't have to happen on your own machine. Any of the College's resource centres, not just this campus, have computers you can use. Bring your USB drive.
Every grade you receive during the year is provisional. It can go up or down. Nothing is final until it has been through internal verification, Pearson, and the College's Assessment Board. Section 04 explains why — read it before you start arguing about a mark.
Every session is in the same room, so at least there's nothing to get lost looking for. Wednesday and Friday have no scheduled classes — that time is yours, and it isn't a day off.
CC-5-G-022, Castlereagh campus. Ground floor. Everything on your timetable happens here.
Timetables get amended during the year. The Student Engage app carries the live version, so check it rather than a printout if something looks off.
It's independent study, and it's the difference between finishing this course comfortably and finishing it in a panic. Reading, research, practice, and getting assignments done before the week they're due. Use one of the two days properly and you'll rarely be in trouble.
Most policies are common sense and you'll never think about them again. These five are different — they have real consequences and people get caught by them every year. Tap each one.
You'll be marked Pass, Merit or Distinction on each unit. The mark on your feedback sheet is the start of a process, not the end of one.
Don't panic about a single mark, and don't bank on one either. If you think an assessment decision is wrong, raise it early with James rather than waiting for results day — there's an academic appeals process and you'll be told how to use it when you get your results.
Your assessment schedule shows both. Practice assignments exist so you can be bad at something safely and get told how to fix it. Graded assignments count. Know which is which before deciding how much effort to spend.
If you need to redo something you'll be told, and you'll submit over the summer. The August board confirms those results, usually in time for the {{ucas|UCAS}} deadline if you're applying to higher education.
You'll get an assessment schedule within your first two weeks with every deadline on it. Put them all in your phone the day you get it.
Electronic, hard copy, or both. Every time. Systems fail and files corrupt, and "it's gone" is your problem, not the College's.
You're stating three things: the work is your own, you've referenced your sources, and you've declared any {{ai|AI tools}} you used. A false declaration is {{malpractice|malpractice}}.
Serious illness, injury, a sudden crisis — things outside your control that stop you working or attending. These can be authorised, and the process is a form: the {{ec1|EC1}} Extenuating Circumstances form, in Public Documents on the College website.
Apply before the deadline, not after it. An authorised late submission is fine. An unauthorised one gets marked under the College and Pearson's rules, which is a much worse place to be. If you're struggling, tell someone while there's still time to help.
Leaving it to the last night. A laptop you didn't back up. Being busy. Genuine crises get support; poor planning doesn't. That distinction is the whole point of the process.
Most problems get solved at the first step. Nobody minds you asking — they mind you not asking until March.
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| Service | What it's for | Contact |
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Confidential, and available outside term time. Inspire Student Support Hub, helpline 0808 800 0032, or inspiresupporthub.org/students using the log-on BMETHUB. You don't need permission or a referral, and you don't need to be in crisis to use it.
College complaints first, via the complaints page on the Belfast Met website. If your complaint is about Pearson's own service, go to them directly; otherwise exhaust the College process first. Still unhappy after that, Northern Ireland has an independent ombudsman — {{nipso|NIPSO}} — at nipso.org.uk.
Talk to James first — book a time and say what's wrong. There may be a fix you haven't thought of. And know the financial side before deciding: withdrawing can make you liable for the full year's fees, including anything paid by the Student Loans Company. If you do withdraw, tell both the College and the SLC quickly to avoid an overpayment you'll have to repay.
Seven questions on the things that actually cost people marks. No pass mark, no record kept — it's just to find out what you'd have got wrong.
Twenty minutes. By the end you'll be in a group of three, and that group will already have everything it needs to start designing. Nothing here is thrown away — it all feeds the task.
Most ice breakers waste the material they generate. This one doesn't. The nine slips on your table are nine starting points, and the argument you had in round four is the first design discussion of your course. Keep the notes — they're the first thing you'll write about in your log at the end of today.
In your group of three, design and prototype an original arcade game with a retro style, then present it. You'll build a playable version using Gear Zero, and you'll keep a reflective log while you do it.
Threes where the numbers allow. Three is the size where everyone has a job and nobody hides. If the register doesn't divide neatly, one group of four is fine — that group splits the driver's job in two.
Real arcade games fit on one screen with no scrolling story and no tutorial. That constraint is the point.
How long a stranger should need to understand your game. If it takes longer, it isn't an arcade game yet.
Arcade games were built to take a coin off you in a noisy room, from someone who had never seen the machine before. That produced a very specific set of design rules, and they're still some of the best design rules there are:
"Retro" isn't just pixel art because pixel art is easier. Pick a specific era and commit to it — the four-colour blockiness of early home computers, the black background and vector lines of an early cabinet, the chunky sprites and loud palettes of the mid-eighties, the pre-rendered look of the mid-nineties. Then be able to say why that era suits your game. That sentence is worth marks.
Anyone can show a finished thing. Showing what you changed and why is the difference between describing and reflecting — and it's the same skill your log is marked on. Groups who skip it will be asked about it anyway.
Three people, three jobs. Rotate them if you want, but agree who has which before you start — and put that in your log, because "we all just did a bit of everything" is where team projects go to die.
You're using an AI tool to build this, openly and deliberately. That's fine. What matters is that you say so, and say what you did with it: what you asked for, what came back, what you changed, what you rejected. Every piece of assessed work you submit carries a declaration covering {{ai|AI use}}, and this task is a low-stakes run at getting that habit right. The College's AI guidance applies from today, not from your first graded assignment.
You'll write one every day for two years. Most people write it badly for the first six months, then work out what it's for and wish they'd started properly. This page is an attempt to save you those six months.
Nobody wants to know how you felt about Tuesday. "Today was good, we got a lot done" is worth exactly nothing.
A list of what happened, in order, is a register. It records that you were present. It doesn't record that you were thinking.
Every day you make choices — which idea to chase, which tool to use, what to cut, who does what, when to stop. A reflective log captures those choices while you still remember why you made them, along with what happened as a result and what you'd do differently. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Every sentence about an action needs a sentence about the thinking. If you've written "we changed the background to black", you're not finished until you've written "because the sprites were getting lost against the blue and you couldn't tell what was dangerous".
Read your entry back. If you can add "so what?" after a sentence and there's no answer, that sentence isn't doing anything.
Specific. Not "worked on the game" — which part, using what, for how long.
What were the options? Why this one? What did you rule out and on what grounds?
Did it work? How do you know? What's the next move because of it?
Not on Sunday night for the whole week. A log written from memory five days later is vague, because your memory is vague — and vague is exactly what loses marks. Ten minutes at the end of each session, while you can still remember what annoyed you, beats an hour at the weekend every single time.
Normally you'd learn this after the fact and spend the last ten minutes trying to remember what happened. Today you know first — so capture as you go. Keep a scrap of paper or an open document next to you and write one line every time you change something: what you changed, and why you changed it. Ten scribbled lines at 15:20 turn into a strong entry at 15:45. Nothing at 15:20 turns into "we made a game and it was good".
Your whole course is marked against the same five criteria. Your log can feed all five — but only if you know what each one is looking for. Pick a criterion, read what it wants, and steal the sentence starters.
One session on the arcade task: the group's first Gear Zero build came back wrong. Here's how three different students would write it up. Same day, same events, wildly different marks.
Not the amount of work. Not the quality of the game. All three students did exactly the same things that afternoon. The difference is entirely in whether they wrote down the thinking that was already in their head — and that thinking is free. You did it anyway. You just have to put it on the page.
Six real sentences from real logs. Pick the stronger rewrite. The explanations are the useful bit, so read them even when you get it right.
Print it, or copy the headings into your own document. After a few weeks you'll stop needing the prompts — but use them until then, because a scaffolded entry beats a blank page every time.
Some days are all technical work and nothing else. That's fine — write that day properly rather than inventing a communication paragraph. Across a fortnight, though, all five should appear. If one of them never does, that's a real gap in how you're working, not just a gap in your writing.
College jargon, assessment jargon and the terms from the task. If a word confuses you in a brief, a policy or a job advert, it should be here.