[Edu-sig] Student Assignment Styles

[Jeffrey Elkner]

Hi Bryce!

What I do first is assign small exercises from each chapter, and then
assign a big project.  I am using Tim's projects this year, and that has
been a *BIG* help.  (this collaboration thing is really working! ;-)

Not all of the chapters in the text book have enough exercises, which is
something I hope will be able to remedy in the next few weeks.  There
are two very good reasons for doing bigger projects:

1.  The ability to write meaningful programs should be a primary
teaching goal.  Academic programs have often come under criticism by
industry for not preparing students for "real world" programming.  There
is a natural tendancy in academia to focus on small examples that make
the concept transparent without confusing learners with extraneous
details.  The problem is students come away with no understanding of the
software development process itself.  Their learning doesn't scale up to
bigger problems.  This is also the motivation for the case study now
used in the Advanced Placeement program.

2. Big projects are Cool!  My experience is that students like them
because they solve more interesting problems.  Tim is doing a great job
of picking projects that my students enjoy doing (thanks again, Tim!)

jeff elkner
yorktown high school
arlington, va


On Thu, 2001-11-29 at 12:30, Bryce Embry wrote:
> Howdy,
> I'm in my first year of teaching computer programming in Python and am 
> developing my material based on the How To Think Like A Computer Scientists 
> book at www.ibiblio.org/obp.  I have to confess that I fell into teaching 
> computer programming without any formal training, and I'm learning a lot of 
> the material as we go along (I'm a few steps ahead of the students, but not 
> far).
> 
> Looking through some of the edu_sig posts, and Timothy Wilson's page at 
> http://www.isd197.org/sibley/cs/icp/, I'm seeing that assigning students a 
> large project seems to be more popular than assigning a number of smaller, 
> more pedantic problems. What is the rationale behind the larger projects as 
> opposed to smaller projects?  What are the benefits and drawbacks of asking 
> students to spend a week on one large project instead of that same week on 
> three or four smaller tasks, then giving a large task once a month or 
> so?  I've been using what I consider to be smaller projects (my stuff is at 
> http://www.bembry.org/tech/python/index.shtml ) and am wondering if fewer, 
> larger projects would be better for my kids.
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bryce Embry
> --- Geek of All Trades, Master of None
> --- Margolin Hebrew Academy
> --- 390 South White Station
> --- Memphis, TN 38117
> --- (901) 682-2409