First off, I need to thank my amazing team of TAs for making this semester a great experience! I’m hoping that this semester turned out to be a positive learning experience for majority of the students. I am quite impressed with the diligence of the students who attended all the lectures (Especially, the 8.30 AM and 5.05 PM classes which tend to be not so ideal times for attending lectures). The final grades of CS020 are what I expected them to be. Students who promptly finished their homework scored significant number of A grades. Students who did not attend the lectures/labs and who submit homework on the last day, scored the lower end of grades. This is quite obvious to me as an instructor and should be obvious to the students as well. Yet, it is an unsolved mystery for me.
These are few unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions I need to work on –
- Why do students keep questions to themselves, like they are a treasure?
- Why do students push their work to the last minute .I’m guilty of this too, but I need to work on how to make the students not to! Procrastinating and Programming do not go well together. There is no shortcut for learning a skill like programming!
I take that extra effort in responding to the students as promptly as I can. The Piazza discussion forum is really good for keeping track of student questions and unresolved queries. With an average response time of 5 minutes for over 400 questions throughout the semester, I still think I could not do justice to a significant number of students who were not asking questions or not using the discussion forum.
In order to motivate students not to procrastinate till the end, I tried the collaborative learning by creating study groups of ~15 students each, for which I assigned a dedicated TA. The incentive for finishing 3 out of 5 problems as a group, two days before deadline could not motivate many students. Probably, I will shift to give incentive for individuals rather than groups next semester.
Majority of the students came into the first day of class without ant prior programming experience. I spent significant time on the basic concepts this time (Fall 2018 students complained that I haven’t spent enough time teaching them). Students had access to 10 minutes of video which they had to watch before attending the lecture. The i-Clicker based quiz at the beginning of the lecture has the questions directly taken from the 10 minutes video. I hoped that majority of students watched the video before attending the lecture (I’m glad many did). I even dropped few questions as easter eggs in the videos!
In a week, lectures are followed by labs. I have my TAs attend the lab sessions where the students work on the assigned programming tasks. If the student finishes their lab work early, they can leave early!
The homework assignments are autograded using MATLAB Grader. I make them available on a Tuesday and they are due the next Thursday (9 days). It is interesting to see that there were a couple of students who finished the homework problems within a day after I make them available! It is also depressing to see students trying out these problems just few hours before submission deadline. Overall, I am very impressed with Teslas and GraceHoppers, (study groups were named after scientists) who have consistently performed well through out the semester on homework problems
The programming assignments is where I truly see how much the students have learned. The three programming assignments this semester were:
- Plotting Cyclotron particle radius vs velocity and trajectories of projectiles
- MineSweeper
- Analyzing Burlington, VT weather from 1940 – 2019
My favorite programming assignment is weather analyzer. It showed the students how they can use tools like MATLAB to do independent research and inquiry into real world data. The assignment that gave nightmares (even to me) is MineSweeper. Though I repeatedly emphasized how important it is to get started with this project early, I was baffled to answer questions like ‘What is MineSweeper?’ during the last week of submission. What could have been a wonderful learning experience, turned out to be a very uncomfortable experience for both the students and the instructors. My poor TAs were stalked through out the week and in their dorms by the students!
My exams are not tough, but they ask very specific questions. If you do not know the concept, it is very unlikely you will get it right. Hence, a thorough preparation guarantees awesome score. I took a mid-term survey and a final survey of what my students think about Programming. Guess what? I made absolutely no impact whatsoever on their perception 🙂 There was no change!
Overall, I am very proud of the performance of majority of my students. I hope my students find the skills they learned in CS020 useful for their major at UVM and even further in their career!
I could not help but post this! Looking forward to teaching this course again in Fall 2019
