Jun 25 2002
The Last Day of Class
I’ve been teaching I2LR (Intro to LEGO Robotics) for the better part of 3 years now. This last semester, I successfully captured lots of rich data that is virtually impossible to mine in my lifetime. Kinda cool what you can do with a little bit of Perl, Scheme, and a 75 TB tape silo.
There are a number of vignettes that are of interest from this semester, which is partially how I break down the data in my mind: what, in this qualitative sample of I2LR, is of interest, and what lessons are learned from those moments. One of those moments was mid-semester, when I stopped and said “what would really make the remainder of this course great for you?” The students responded, and we shifted the focus of the course to accomodate their desires. As a result, attendance was nearly perfect, and the students were all engaged and active for the remainder of the semester.
The last day of class was another excellent moment. I let them work for a bit, so they could coordinate for their final presentations. Then, I started by giving them a little bit of background on Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. This excellent article is a distillation of a good deal of work by these two authors, and I try and keep in mind at all stages of the educational process, from design to implementation. I put this to the students, and asked them first where they thought I succeeded, in their opinion, in I2LR, and why. This was a good discussion. Then, I asked them where I missed. This, too, was a good discussion; the image provided here is a bit of the board as it evolved over the course of the discussion.
Then, we segued into discussion of what should be kept, tossed, and added to the course. This was a fascinating discussion as well, as students I knew and had worked closely with all semester gave me some very good feedback on the course, and were very honest and open about all aspects of the experience. I’ve done this every semester, but this is the first semester I’ve done such a good job of capturing the entire conversation.
I’ve transcribed this discussion, and think it could make an excellent reflection paper on the semester. It would be an opportunity to introduce the SIGCSE crowd to Chickering and Gamson (they’ve never been cited before in the literature, despite the fact that they’ve been writing since the early 80’s), as well as introducing the course, the guiding theories behind it, and an intimate, qualitative view of student’s reactions to such a course.
Thoughts?
Comments Off