Session 1 Assignment : To Try

Please join this comment area to share
your commitment to try.

Dr. Sheldon has asked for all participants to share with the group what they are willing to try moving forward in their classes.

Here is the feedback from a few folks moving forward in their current courses. 

Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 4:10 PM
To: William Sheldon
Subject: My Commitment

Hello Dr. Sheldon,

Thanks so much for your class today.  As we were discussing at the end, I am new here and very interested in exploring new approaches to teaching computer programming.  The traditional lecture methods used when I was a student were not always ideal and in a field like computer programming (like many others) students really do learn best by doing not listening.

Although I do feel some amount of lecture is absolutely necessary, I would like to try reducing the amount of time I spend talking and increase the amount of time they spend doing.  So I'd like to try breaking up the class into several blocks each of which starts with me introducing a topic and then giving them a small programming assignment to reinforce their understanding.

I am also very interested in the team approach you advocated.  Many of these students will work in large teams as programmers when they graduate.  I've seen the benefit of team learning in a business setting and would like to try incorporating that into the classroom as well.

I have one class with only 4 students.  I was considering breaking them up into teams of two and giving them the opportunity for some friendly competition working on projects.  However I could just make them into one team of four.  Any suggestions?

Thanks and have a terrific weekend,

John

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John Sheehan

Instructor of Computer Science

SUNY Ulster County Community College

Dr. Sheldon's response

Great job getting back to me so quickly, John. I think with your teams I would actually do both. If you give and out of class assignment each time, before of them can talk about and compare the different solutions when they come in each time. But, your idea of having to teams with some friendly competition to work on projects is also a great one. I would really do both. There are no strict rules – – there are some guidelines that I communicated but there is certainly the opportunity to experiment. Let me know how your team approach is going – – that sounds like a great class to experiment with it. Maybe post to our blog to communicate with everyone.