[Edu-sig] Migrating to Projects - Was: Low Enrollments - programming as anti-intellectualism

[Rob Malouf]

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 12:31 -0700, Trent Oliphant wrote:
> 
> This brings up an interesting discussion point, one in which I would
> be 
> extremely interested personally:  How do you help students (or
> yourself) move 
> from writing scripts, functions, classes, modules etc. to writing a
> larger 
> project. 

This probably isn't the answering you're looking for, but the way I do
it in our computational linguistics program is to give students large
group projects.  Most of the students coming in don't have a lot of
computer background, and I just don't have time to teach them much more
than the basics (it's a two year master's program, and there's lots of
linguistics to be covered as well). In a group project, the more skilled
students generally wind up taking on a "project manager" role and
teaching the less skilled students how to organize things.  So far it's
worked fairly well.  It's not 100% successful, but that's okay: our
graduates generally either go on for a PhD somewhere else, or they get a
job with a computer company managing internationalization or something
like that.  

-- 
Rob Malouf <rmalouf at mail.sdsu.edu>
Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages
San Diego State University