Designing a course with constraints
One of the hats I wear at Hunter is to build a new CS Honors program and to bring my particular brand of insanity to Hunter College CS as a whole.
Yesterday was my last class for the semester so I thought I'd write a bit about the course.
For the Fall semester, I taught an intro programming course to the entire cohort. For some in the cohort, this was their first exposure to CS. Others had one or more classes under their belt. It was a Python based programming class and a big part of it was to start building the cohort into a community. I'm going to work on tweaking what I taught for next time around but the constraints of designing such a course are pretty common – an intro course where the students all want to be there the level of previous experience varies to some degree.
Second semester was more of a challenge. The "next" course was CSCI 135, CS 100 - like APCS but in C++. I could teach that but since some of my students had APCS credit, they didn't need 135. This would break up the group. There was also the issue of the students getting credit for the course without showing any proficiency in C++.
Fortunately, Hunter requires students in 135 to take CSCI 136. A 1 credit programming lab. It meets once a week in a computer lab and the students complete a weekly programming assignment. The lab meets for 2 hours. The instructor goes over anything that's needed for the lab that hasn't been covered yet and then the students work independently (with the instructors support) on the lab. Overall it works well. It makes sure the students are spending at least a couple of hours a week coding in a supported environment.
How did 136 help me? I taught a 3 credit course where 1 day was basically the lab component (what the students were to do in 136) and one day was enrichment - the stuff I was going to do with them. This enabled us keeping the cohort together and it also made sure that by taking the class, the honors cohort members with AP credit would indeed get up to speed in C++.
I was happy with the basic structure. I was able to cover some topics in project development, testing, debugging, and software engineering but the designing and teaching the class proved to be challenging for a number of reasons.
One was timing. The lab class meets 1 day a week for 1 hour. My class, 2 days a week for 1 hour 15. This meant that if we were to keep the lab to one day either the students would have less time or I'd have to impose on them to stay late or come early. I wasn't happy with that but given the inconsistency in the way the other sections handled lab timings, I think it worked out OK.
Some of the other difficulties included:
The language was C++:
Since the labs were to be done in C++, I had to use that as the language for the class. That meant no "fun" libraries or frameworks.
The labs were solo assignments:
Since the labs were solo projects and there was one per week it made it very difficult to structure group experiences. I wanted to cover things like group development, code review, working off of other peoples code bases but this proved difficult with an outside separate lab being handed down each week.
Someone else dictated the language sequence:
The labs were designed to support what the students were learning in 135 and were only distributed a day or two before the week was to start. This meant that I couldn't plan too far ahead and had to adjust frequently. This should be easier next year.
Labs didn't match the supplemental material:
The best example of this was when we were talking about testing. We ended up using Catch as a testing framework. The problem was that right afterwards the lab (and also 135 project) didn't lend themselves to using a testing framework like catch.
There were more challenges but overall I think the class went fairly well. I'll know more when I get feedback from the students and when we all look back next year with some perspective.
It's been an interesting experience designing a class that had to interleave with another, existing class. I've designed many classes over the years and I know that whatever you plan, it probably changes once you're actually in the classroom and working with the kids, or as Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." This has been a little more of a challenge but I think the first go through went well and that the course will get better and be better defined as we go through a couple more iterations.
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