Chris1
Right, okay.
Right.
As far as I can tell I’m now working.
Okay.
What I’ve brought is just three assignments because I’m assessing the course
probably quite differently now.
Rather than setting three pieces of coursework in
the first semester, I’m now setting one a week, so they get seven much smaller
pieces of work, and the deadline is every week.
So I’ve got the very first piece
they do, then one that’s midway through the semester and the last one.
one is particularly interesting.
The last
What I’m doing now, we’ve still got a 20 credit
course but it lasts the whole year so it’s far less intense and it’s much slower
paced.
And, as part of our reconstruction of the first and second year, I’ve lost a
lot of material. Some of it has gone to other first year modules, some of it has
shifted up to the second year, and some of it has disappeared completely.
teaching less material over a longer period of time.
So I’m
But one of the prob… I’ve
still got the task book idea, so they still have to do a chapter of that every week
during semester one; so that’s semester one, seven pieces of coursework and the
task book, and then an exam in January which is multiple choice: that counts for
40% of the course.
And the remaining 60% of the course, there’s two
courseworks in semester two, bigger courseworks, and an essay type exam in
May/June.
Again, they have to pass the coursework and the theoretical side to
pass the course but they only have to re-sit one or other if they fail – assuming
they only fail one.
The main reason to get them to submit one piece of
coursework a week is because I want to get them out of the habit very early on in
their university careers of leaving it until the last minute.
And, rather than let them
leave that until the last minute five times and be in the middle of semester two, if
they leave that four times, they’re still only halfway through semester one.
idea is to train them into realising that this stuff has to be done.
So the
They are
relatively small pieces of work but they still take quite a long time to mark, so it’s
fairly intensive in terms of time.
As far as the material is concerned, I have started teaching objects last rather than
objects first. I used to do Bluejay and start with objects, and I found that the
biggest problem they had was understanding what an object is, because in
working in them from the start they’re never actually able to stand back and ask
themselves what is an object.
What I do now is start off with just a main function
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and they write the whole thing in that: reading, writing to files, doing loops, running
through… iterating through arrays of A lists, conditional statements, this sort of
thing, very, very slowly, and they don’t even hear the word object until about week
eight.
I work my way up from the main function to encapsulation, the idea of
methods, so you get code reuse and encapsulation of local variables, and then an
object is just introduced as essentially a set of encapsulated methods.
That’s
how I’m really looking at it now.
So by the end of semester one they’ve seen most of the theory they’re going to
see; they should know how to do things and they should know roughly what an
object is, but they know nothing about ((static?)), nothing about final, nothing
about interfaces, very little about polymorphism type binding, this sort of thing; a
lot of that is now considered to be secondary material. It seems to be working
quite well: I did it last year and they like the idea of weekly assignments, they
definitely like that idea and it seems to improve their habits when they get into the
second year as well. They seem to have a better attitude, those of them who get
that far.
To put them into a little bit of training, the last piece of coursework, the
seventh piece, comes in three parts.
They have to submit one part in week seven,
eight and nine, but it’s only marked at the end of week nine, so the last one is three
put in together; they have to submit it weekly, but only the last one is marked and
they get marks knocked off if they didn’t submit in seven and eight. So it’s sort of
getting them into the habit of, if you get a big piece of coursework, break it down
into small parts and keep working on it regularly, rather than do it all in one go on
the last day.
((laughs))
The second semester is mainly concentrated, once I’ve dealt with bits that I haven’t
done in the first semester, the rest of it, starting just about now, week four, is
working very closely with another module. We have a module called
Programming Performance and Efficiency, in which essentially they’re taught the
theory of data structures and they’re taught Big O Notation, they’re taught a list has
this complexity, a binary tree has this complexity, and so on.
And my course
then, in the second semester, essentially is saying, “Well you’ve been told what a
linked list is, you’ve been told what a binary tree is, and this is how you program
those things.”
And then their coursework is I give them most of the code; they
have to finish the code and then try it on different size files and plot the results on
a graph. So the idea is to let them see that this Big O Notation is not something
theoretical; they can actually see the graphs going off the scale in some cases, and
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hopefully understand. They don’t.
They don’t understand the complexity.
They
say a binary tree is better than a linked list because it’s n log n, but they don’t
really understand what that means.
They can’t look up the graph and demonstrate
that it’s n log n, and they can’t explain why it’s log n or n or n2 or whatever, they
just know the words. So there’s a little bit of work needed to do on that.
But in general the course seems to be going quite well and the most… the
particularly good bit, I think, is the fact that they enjoy the seven weekly
assessments rather than the big lumps, and others of my colleagues are beginning
to come to that.
It’s one of the few things I’ve influenced my colleagues on
because they can see the results. It doesn’t work completely well: we do have
quite a lot who seem to disengage fairly early but then they seem to disengage with
the whole course fairly early, and in many cases I think they’re probably hopeless
and we shouldn’t have let them in in the first place.
I think that’s pretty much it, but it is a completely different change. A lot of the
material disappeared and it’s objects last, not objects first, and a lot more labour
intensive on behalf of the lecturer. Okay?
Yeah, fine, okay.
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