Oct 29 2004
Students blogging programming experiences
Found on transterpreter.org, via Cool Stuff in Computer Science:
| We asked the students taking part in the Cool Stuff in Computer Science project if they would be willing to blog their experiences using occam on the LEGO Mindstorms. So far, I (Matt, slinker wrangler) have been writing about CSCS as it progresses this term on my own weblog. Another Matt (we have around 700 of them in CSCS this year) has started keeping track of things over at blog.qualityerrors.net. His first post is a back-fill for the last few weeks.
As we see more blogs on this topic, we’ll mention them here, and try and get a coherent page of links together (or perhaps a blogroll somewhere on the margins of this page). Thanks, and welcome, Matt! |
All right, this is a bit much; I’ve just replicated my own weblog post across three blogs, and yes, I feel dirty doing it. However, I am pleased that at least one of the students taking part in CSCS took us up on our request, and was willing to keep a weblog of their experiences using occam on the LEGO Mindstorms.
This is really kinda cool in a lot of ways, I think. We have me weblogging about our experiences running CSCS, there’s a variety of forms of information regarding the transterpreter (bug databases, weblog, papers), and now we have one (and hopefully more) students exploring their experiences with the technology as we work with it.
As someone helping develop the technology, as well as develop and present material related to it, it’s going to be nice to have a closed feedback loop, where we can go and see what’s going on from the student’s perspective. This kind of timely feedback can be invaluable both from an instructional point of view (”Was that clear? Did they get it?”), and from a technological standpoint (”Is the technology working? Do we need to think about evolving our libraries/APIs/etc.?”).
From a technological perspective, this is a slow, inefficient, distributed kind of API usability testing like the work carried out by Steven Clark and the rest of his colleagues at Microsoft. From an instructional perspective… certainly there’s some educators out there doing this already, no?