0 It sounded like a good idea at the time

This session began with Robert McCartney - a 60 something (white, male) computer science professor dressed in a jeans and a pinkish colored blazer with a christmas hat on with bells.

"Bringing useful truth to SIGCSE since 2007"

Another session that SIGCSE participants look forward to. The contributors of this session describe pedagogical approaches that seemed to be good ideas but turned out as failures. Contributors describe their pedagogical experiment, the rationale for the experiment, evidence of failure, and lessons learned.

Robert McCartney - Computers in Modern Society
University of Connecticut

Some years ago, there was a general education course for students; primarily taken by seniors but designed for freshman students.

Bad course == opportunity

• Old course material + cultural reading, overview of some fundamental computing topics + programming in scheme + flexible class project
• Other great stuff: hand picked lab instructors; active learning in lecture, great material; general-purpose language
• What went wrong? student complaints - "too much work for a freshman level course"; Chair received complaints from the Deans of three other schools; nearly half of the class dropped the course, even though a graduation requirement.
• Of the 44 remaining students, exactly one written evaluation was positive; none were neutral.
• Ended up dropping the course from the curriculum.

Why did the course go wrong?

• Course did not match students' expectations
• Poor understanding of why old course was unpopular
• Different views of what is interesting.

After 14 years, they are now proposing a new general education course in CS. "Introduction to the principles of programming and computing" , based on Abelson & Sussman SICP, and including Scheme programming.

Edward Gehringer, NC State
The Plan

• Collect data in one class to support two thesis projects, and lay the groundwork for future research proposals
• When? Fall 2006
• ECE/CSC 517 - OOP
• The Software: Expertiza peer-review system; Distributed pair programming environment Sangam, Remote visual-display environment Facetop; Recording program Hackystat; Eclipse and NetBeans; web-services language Water
  
• Goal: Sangam + Facetop: WOrld's best DPP Environment, ...
• Sept 1: First Warning Sign - facetop only runs on Macs; only 5 students said they have programmed on a mac, but no one in class had a mac; so arranged to borrow Macs from another project.
• Sept 11: More Trouble - the first assignment was refactoring Expertiza, could not get Expertiza to build in Eclipse
• The Continuing Saga - Sept 13 - apologize for delay on projects
• Sept 21 - graduate student drops out of grad school!
• Other concerns: studetns with macs could not run Facetop; students not recording; semester half over before 1st due date; other grad student switched advisors.
• Results: Instructor was an effective teacher (1.75); course was excellent (1.38)
• Course got better ratings over the next several years.

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Improving the Quality of Student Presentations (Or Failing To Do So)
Dave Musicant (Carleton College)

• Attempted to teach students better style of presentations. Did not want them to read off of powerpoints. Students just read off of powerpoints.
  
• "My prof hates powerpoint, I can just stand there and babble"
  
• Dave's conjecture: Powerpoint is an averaging mechanism.

Strong speaker + Tufte's ideas = great presentation
Inexperienced speaker + PPT = mediocre presentation
Inexperienced speaker + no PPT= DISASTER

Before Intervention: 21 students

• 12 students really liked talks
• 5 students liked them, but with caveats
• 3 students learned from their own only
• 1 student thought they were useless

After Intervention: 14 students

• 1 student really liked the talks
• 2 students liked them, but with caveats
• 2 students learned from their own only
• .....

Lesson 1: They're not ready for this
Lesson 2: Sometimes things are popular for a reason.
Lesson 3: Busy people optimize their efforts

*****************************
Raymond Lister
University of Technology, Sidney

• Voodoo Programming - even if the program works, students don't understand how/why it works
• Shotgun debugging - a process of making changes in hope that it fixes the bug.
• At the end of the 1st semester, most students can't write code (systematically), so ...
• In the final exam, he tested students understanding of given code (MC exam)
• Provided the students with ALL the diagrams from class, for the exam.
  
• 1/3 got it wrong
• 40% of the class flunked
  
• 20-35% got each of 7 similar questions wrong
• This MCQ and the seven others were from a pool of 30 GIVEN TO STUDENTS BEFORE THE EXAM.
• Theories - poor teaching, students are dumb, students are lazy, students are ruined by computer games; should have learnt FORTRAN like Raymond
• We only retain 30% of what we hear in lecture. Experts organize material in a usable way.
• Lesson: the students did not have the skills to use the diagrams.
• The Middle Novice Programmer: between the two extremes- who we should focus on.

JiTTery Start
Steve Wolfman - U. British Columbia

• How do you con students into reading the textbook?
  
• Just-in-Time Teaching (JITT) - "JiTT is where you tell your students to read the textbook before class and mean it"
• Class - Discrete Mathematics & Hardware
• Give the students pre-class learning goals (what they should know before coming to class) Accompanied by assigned reading and recommended problems.
  
• Also give students pre-class quiz and grade for correctness (student self-assessment)
• Pre What went wrong - this is starting to work well, took abstract ideas and made it a mess!
• "its like a medical trial, where the theory says that it is working, but the patients are dying."
• You don't adopt ideas, you ADOPT them.

Lessons Learned: Lecture

• Have help for in-class discussion
• Quizzes need "Little questions"
• Explicitly discuss the quiz results
• Scaffold problems, use problems with various levels of difficulty, provide some worked exalmples
• Structure lessons carefully
• Work on culture of participation and pair work
• Plan for both slow and quick finishers
• Tie back to the big picture

Janet Davis. "Experiences with just-in-time teaching in systems and design courses" SIGCSE 2009

Just in Tim Teaching - Blending Active Learning with Web Technology