How It Works in Practice¶
The Student Experience and What Supervisors See¶
What This Document Covers¶
This document describes what students actually do when they use Vestigia — not at the level of philosophy, but at the level of practice.
It addresses Guide A and Guide B in turn, describing what each phase asks of students and what the experience tends to look like from a supervision perspective. It also addresses how Vestigia interacts with Agile project management — the dominant methodology in CS, IT, and Engineering final-year projects — and what the common failure modes look like so they can be recognised early.
Guide A in Practice — During the Project¶
What students are asked to do¶
Guide A asks students to maintain a working record throughout their project. The record is individual and private — students are not required to share it with staff, submit it for assessment, or maintain it in any particular tool or format.
What the record should contain is defined by five categories, used as lenses rather than mandatory sections:
◆ Direction and intention — brief notes on what the student is currently trying to achieve and why
◇ Decisions and trade-offs — documentation of significant choices, the alternatives considered, and the trade-offs accepted
◆ Work performed — what was done in a session or period, with individual contribution distinguished from group activity
◇ Problems and failure — honest accounts of what went wrong, traced to their causes where possible
◆ Reflection in motion — moments where understanding changed, assumptions were revised, or approach shifted
Students are not asked to write under each heading for every entry. A single flowing paragraph that touches a decision and a reflection is entirely appropriate. The categories exist to help students notice what is worth recording — not to create a bureaucratic structure.
The recommended rhythm is entry-level: after meaningful work sessions, after key decisions, after problems, after meetings, and at minimum once per week. Entries should be brief and honest. The explicitly stated guidance is that a short, honest entry written in real time is worth far more than a detailed reconstruction written weeks later.
The medium is the student's choice¶
Vestigia does not prescribe tools or formats. Students may use markdown files in a private repository, a digital notebook, a document tool, or a physical notebook. The only requirements are that entries are dated, sequential, and legible to the student's future self.
This intentional flexibility removes one of the most common sources of friction in log book traditions — the mismatch between an institutionally prescribed format and the way a student actually works.
What supervision conversations look like with active Guide A users¶
Students who have been keeping consistent Guide A records tend to arrive at supervision meetings differently from those who have not.
They typically have specific material to discuss — a decision they made and the reasoning behind it, a problem they encountered and how they addressed it, a question that emerged from a specific piece of work. The conversation moves from "how is the project going?" to something more substantive because the student has already done the work of noticing and recording what is actually happening.
This tends to benefit supervisors as well. Meetings become more diagnostic and less reconstructive. The supervisor can engage with the actual state of the project rather than a generalised update.
A practical observation
Students who begin Guide A in the first two weeks of their project consistently report better supervision conversations and stronger report sections than those who start later or not at all. The early weeks — problem definition, initial scoping, first architectural or methodological decisions — are often the most important to have on record. They are also the most commonly missed.
Guide A and Agile Projects¶
The majority of CS and IT final-year projects run in Agile sprints. Vestigia's Guide A aligns naturally with this structure.
Sprint ceremonies create reliable recording triggers:
◆ Sprint planning — direction and intention entries: what is this sprint trying to achieve, what decisions shape it
◇ Daily stand-ups — brief work performed notes, individual contribution distinguished from team activity
◆ Sprint review — work performed summary, outcomes against goals
◇ Sprint retrospective — problems, reflection in motion, decisions carried forward
A student who writes a substantive Vestigia entry at each sprint boundary — three to five minutes of honest recording immediately after the retrospective — produces a project record that is both practically useful and genuinely reflective. This is the timing where reconstruction error is lowest and specificity is highest.
Students are not required to integrate Vestigia with formal sprint documentation. The individual Vestigia record sits alongside sprint logs, meeting minutes, and retrospective notes — complementing rather than duplicating them. Where sprint documentation captures what the team agreed, the Vestigia record captures what the individual was thinking, deciding, and learning.
On group Agile projects and individual records
A question that sometimes arises is how individual Vestigia records relate to shared sprint documentation in group projects. The answer is that they serve different purposes and different audiences. Sprint documentation is a collective, process-facing artefact — it captures what the team agreed and what was delivered. A Vestigia record is individual and development-facing — it captures what this student thought, decided, and learned. Both are appropriate and neither replaces the other. Professional practice works the same way.
Guide B in Practice — After the Project¶
What students are asked to do¶
Guide B begins when the project ends. It is structured around two inputs — Vestigia records and project artefacts — and four extraction filters: decisions, learning, problems and resolutions, and individual contribution.
The process is:
◆ apply the four filters to both inputs to identify moments of genuine significance
◇ consult the extraction prompts to interrogate material in depth
◆ connect the extracted material into a coherent narrative addressing four questions: what was this project, what was my role, what decisions and learning shaped my work, and what came out of it
◇ organise and present the result in a format appropriate to the student's discipline and purpose
The output is not prescribed. For some students it is a portfolio case study. For others it is a well-documented GitHub repository and a set of interview talking points. For others it is a structured LinkedIn summary or a CV section supported by a linked showcase. All are valid. The framework provides the thinking and the method; the form is the student's decision.
What Guide B produces in practice¶
Students who work through Guide B with adequate Guide A records as their source material tend to produce professional narratives that are notably more specific and more honest than those produced without that foundation.
Specifically, they can:
◆ explain decisions rather than just describing outcomes
◇ distinguish their individual contribution from collective team work with specificity
◆ discuss failure and difficulty in terms of what it produced, not just that it occurred
◇ connect reflection to concrete moments rather than offering generic statements
These are exactly the qualities that distinguish strong individual performance on reflection and professional practice assessments — and that distinguish strong candidates in graduate interviews.
Students who attempt Guide B without Guide A records face a harder version of the same task. Guide B explicitly acknowledges this and provides guidance for reconstruction from formal artefacts — but the result is consistently less specific and less honest than work produced from live records.
The integrity dimension¶
Guide B includes a dedicated section on integrity and attribution. This addresses the specific challenge of presenting collaborative work individually — how to be specific about individual contribution without misrepresenting collective effort, and how to maintain credibility in material that may be scrutinised professionally.
This is not a compliance section. It is a professional skills section. The questions it raises — "would my teammate consider my account fair?", "can I defend everything here in a conversation?" — are the same questions professional portfolios and CVs face. Students benefit from engaging with them explicitly before publishing rather than after.
Common Failure Modes¶
Understanding where students typically struggle with Vestigia helps you support them more effectively if you choose to mention it.
Starting too late. The most common problem. Students who begin Guide A in the second half of their project find that the decisions and early reflections most valuable for Guide B are already lost to memory. The first four to six weeks are the hardest to recover and the most worth recording.
Recording activity rather than thinking. Some students produce work logs — lists of what they did — rather than records of what they decided, why, and what they learned. Work logs have some value but are thin source material for Guide B. The five category prompts exist precisely to redirect students from narrating activity toward capturing thinking.
Skipping the failure category. Students often underrecord problems and failures, either because they feel embarrassing or because they resolve quickly and feel minor in retrospect. Guide A is explicit about this: the honest account of difficulty, traced to its cause, is among the most professionally valuable material a student can produce. Supervisors can help by normalising the discussion of problems in supervision conversations — if the student knows that recording failure is valued, they are more likely to do it.
Treating Guide B as a polishing exercise. Some students approach Guide B as though it were a writing task — turning rough notes into polished prose. It is not. It is a selection and interpretation task. Students who skip the extraction work and go straight to writing tend to produce showcases that are either too comprehensive (everything included, nothing filtered) or too vague (summarised so heavily that nothing specific remains). The extraction filters exist to prevent both failure modes.
What Vestigia Looks Like From the Outside¶
You will not see Vestigia records unless a student chooses to share them. You will not assess them directly. You will not know whether a student is using the framework at all unless they tell you.
What you may notice, in students who have been using it:
◆ more specific language in supervision meetings — "I chose X over Y because..." rather than "we've been working on..."
◇ stronger justification sections in proposals and reports — reasoning that was written at the time, not reconstructed later
◆ more grounded reflection submissions — specific moments and specific changes in understanding, not generic statements
◇ clearer articulation of individual contribution in group project contexts
None of this is guaranteed. Vestigia is a tool. Tools work when they are used consistently and with genuine intent. Some students will engage with it deeply. Some will use it partially. Some will not use it at all.
What the framework does is make the practice available — clearly enough that students who want it can find it and use it independently, without requiring staff to teach it.
Continue to Mentioning It to Students for practical framing and suggested language.