Course Report 2018

Several students remark on the size of Assignment 1, the feeling of being overwhelmed early on in the course, and falling behind early and struggling to make up for that for the rest of the course. It seems clear that there is a group of students who struggle too much with the course, seemingly because they do not understand how to use the support system.

Ideas moving forward:

• Move some of Assignment 1 over to the bootstrap, replacing old bootstrap exercises which were more aligned with the previous Assignment 1.
• Spend some cycles on improving the text of Assignment 1 which was written in haste, and there was no time to fix it up during the course.
• Share information about how to set up an environment, etc. before the course starts so that students can prepare.
• Have mandatory demonstrations during the bootstrap labs to get people going with demonstrations earlier.
• Reward asking for help through an achievement. (Asking for help in a clear and efficient way is a skill!)
• Totally rewrite the list and iterator parts of Assignment 1, possibly giving some of the list code for free.
• Offer programming support or other help outside of lab hours, possibly assign office hours to head teacher

Several students point out the need for taking breaks. This is something that the achievement system supports, and I do make continuous references to taking a week off during the course given that the planning holds. Maybe because many are behind and many more are stressed, this is not taken entirely seriously.

Ideas moving forward

• Have an AFK achievement which is essentially a reward for a break.
• Be stricter with deadlines so that deadlines missed cannot get onto the backlog until the next course.

During the course (and also in the evaluation), students remarked on the problem of finding other partners to demonstrate with. The last 2 years, we have witnessed this problem becoming increasingly exacerbated. Clearly, this becomes a problem for too many late in the course. Some students also suffer bad matches with partners, like uneven pairs where one does all the work or one where the partner constantly promises to deliever but never follows through.

Ideas moving forward

• Skip programming pairs, but requires pairs for demonstrations. Build support for pairing people up in the AU portal.
• Relax the constraint of pair demonstration towards the end of the course, but this will not work out unless the staff situation improves.
• Skip the pair idea altogether (creates other problems!)
• On a somewhat related note, some students have a hard time making synthesis and connecting achievements. Maybe the portal could connect students that want to demonstrate achievements which go well together, addressing both synthesis and pairing at the same time.

Fewer students than even attended lectures (c.f. Figure 4).

Ideas moving forward

• Provide video lectures
• Change format to more inactive lectures (note, our experiment with using “lektioner” 3 years back showed that students don’t attend.)

Man har lärt sig mycket mer jämfört med andra kurser

Har lärt mig väldigt mycket om programmering.

Har lärt mig otroligt mycket!

Verkligen lärt mig programeringstänket

Inlupparna man vart verkligen tvingad att förstå

Systemet med mål har varit ett bra upplägg där man lätt kan se vad man behöver göra för att klara kursen

Jag tycker att det har varit bra att man blir examinerad kontinuerligt genom kursens gång

Bra med mål för att kolla att vi lär oss

Mycket lärorik att redovisa mål.

Jag gillade upplägget med mål på kursen. Det gjorde att man själva kunde välja vad man ville lära sig för dagen.

Stor eloger till fantastiskt tålmodiga, engagerade och ständigt uppmuntrande lärare och assistenter!

Tobias commitment and engagment to help everyone in the course

alla som varit med och lärt oss. Labbassarna var varit super!

Bra labassar och alltid tillgänglig lärare!

Tobias och assarna har varit riktigt bra

The lectures get a few mentions but not very many. I’ll return to this in the Lecture section below. Students also explicitly mention flexibility of the teaching team.

Given that I revamped Assignment 1, tried an entirely new methodology, and wrote everything up mostly at night time during my vacation, I was not surprised that Assignment 1 still needs work. It became apparent during the first sprint of the course that many students were struggling, across all programming backgrounds.

Inlupparna var lite väl stora så hade svårt att komma ikapp

Inlupp 1 skulle kunna kortas ner, den var väldigt stor och tog lång tid (mer än vad jag tycker är rimligt).

Kanske inte ändra på inlämningar så nära inpå att dom ska göras.

Making the first assignment easier, since the difficulty on the first one made almost everybody fall behind in the course

Första inlämningsuppgiften kunde ha varit lite mindre.

Inlupp1 kändes väldigt (och onödigt) överdimensionerad

For Assignment 1, I envision a number of changes:

• Rewrite parts of it to make it easier to read
• Completely rewrite the text on linked lists and interators instead of reusing old texts
• Foreshadow some of the coming bits to help with structure and time planning. Possibly move some bit over to Assignment 2.
• Possibly reduce the requirements, but I have a strong suspicion that the main source of pain is the structure of the text, not the complexity of the programming. Some students have implored me not to lower the requirements of this assignment. I will do my best not to.

Remarkably, this year we managed to lower the waiting time in demonstrations. Some students remark that the very large Assignment 1 made many students aim for lower grades (meaning fewer demonstrations) but the proportions of students aiming for 3 or higher grades were about the same as last year.

Man har inte råd att slösa 4 timmar per vecka på att stå i väntekön för att få redovisa!!! Det är seriöst den enda grejen som jag tycker är helt oacceptabel i kursen

Precis som alla andra kurser med labbar - kortare kötider

Det tog alldeles för lång tid att få redovisa mål

lägga mer vikt vid att få folk att ta mål i början så att det inte blir så långa köer i mitten och slutet av kursen

[D]e långa redovisnings tiderna.

Until I have an idea of what the TA resources will be for fall of 2019, I wont bother with this issue for fear of wasting time.

Some students remarked on the workload being very high. Some remarked on the workload being reasonable.

Some called for more air in the schedule to allow for some breaks. This will not happen, but I will integrate into the suggestions for next year for students to build breaks into their plans. If I try to schedule them it will just make a mess.

For the first time (IIRC), differences between TAs find its way to things that warrant improvement more than once.

Students also remark negatively on me chasing updates to the course material during the course. This is of course something to avoid always. (Not that one always succeeds, though.)

Course satisfaction is up \(0.1\) point average over 2017. Last year, there were more 4’s than 5’s.

Student effort is up \(0.1\) point average over 2017.

Students are generally satisfied with the lectures. The average is up by \(0.3\). The comments on the lectures are roughly the same as usual. It is hard to plan a fixed lecture content when so many students work at such different paces.

Lecture attendance is about the same as in 2017. Personally I feel that there were fewer students than even attending the lectures, but I did not make consistent counds. I also had several students remark that they had never seen such high lecture attendance so far into a course. It seems that lectures are dying slowly finally.

In general, most students seem quite happy about the lectures, but that may be more related to delivery than to content or payoff.

15% of all students think the number of lectures should be lower in favour of video content in 2019. 8% of all students think all lectures should be replaced by video content.

13% think video material is not needed on this course.

And lastly, 52% thinks video lecture are a good supplement to traditional lectures.

In the comments about the lectures, some students called for more coding during lectures. I toned this down because of how previous studenst have expressed concerns about the value of code-oriented lecturing.

I was particularly interested in seeing the feedback on the assignments, given that almost all assignments were either completely rewritten or completely overhauled.

The difficulty level of the C assignments are at the right level.

Students seem to agree that assignment 1 was too large (60% think it was somewhat or overly large).

I was happy to see that even though it was frustrating to extract the assignement text from a large body of text, it seems to have been. I believe that the high value on value is because of the mix of theory and practice.

The difficulty level of the Java assignments seem to be well-placed.

The extent of the Java assignments seem to also be well-placed.

I was happy to see that even though it was frustrating to extract the assignement text from a large body of text, it seems to have been. I believe that the high value on value is because of the mix of theory and practice.

I also asked the students to discuss their feelings for the current design in which each assignment comes in two parts, a fairly strictly scoped assignment, and then a freer assignment that builds on the previous. Students disagree wildly on this point. Some argue that it is both good and bad. About 30% of the students think that the assignments should be a lot freer. About 35% wants wants just a little more freedom. 18% are satisfied as-is.