Short Intros

Everyone talked briefly about what they had done in the past year.

• Paul mentioned that the experiment of applying Service Learning to CSC207 did not go very well.
• Steve talked about how overwhelmed he is by the appeal of the games programming courses he has done recently and the kinds of other projects that has led to such as a Nuit Blanche exhibit.
• Arnold has been using competitions in his courses to motivate students (prizes are coffee cards).
• Danny  has been using multiple levels of work in his courses: anonymous submissions in class, weekly problem sets, to assignments.  The advantage of the multiple levels is that it keeps students involved, and gives Danny a better sense of  how well students are understanding the material.
• Diane mentioned the success of the DCS Ambassadors program and also talked about her work with Michelle and Francois on Forming Reasonably Optimal Groups.
• Michelle talked about all the recruiting and outreach work she has been doing.  Gr8 Designs for Gr8 Girls expanded to other universities this year, and Michelle is involved in nation-wide effort to improve CS outreach.
• Michael talked about the different types of students that take A20 vs A08 at UTSC.  They tend to be more competitive and he had more problems with cheating.  He also consolidated TA office hours to provide more of a help desk like service to the UTSC students.

Course web sites

We know we need to do some work this summer to simplify how our course web sites are put together.  Right now there is a mess of fragile scripts that make it all work.  Based on a discussion on the CS bulletin boards, students seem to like our home built course web sites and offered a few helpful suggestions for improvements.  In particular, they liked Danny’s use of Google calendars.  We will have to look into how easy it would be to aggregate course calendars as well.

The discussion at the retreat shifted to whether we needed to create an area of our course web sites that only current students could access with a password.  This led into a discussion of whether we should or shouldn’t post solutions to assignments.  Not surprisingly, no consensus was reached.  (This would actually be a good topic for another post.)

Memory models

Paul and Andrew are working with some undergrad students on a CSC494 project to build an executable memory model for Python.  The goal is to build a model that can be used in CSc108, and as students learn more about how Python works and about how the computer works, more aspects of the memory model would be revealed.

UTM Alumni Survey

Jeremy conducted a survey of UTM CS alumni to find out what kinds of jobs they were in.  He is still analyzing the data and trying to figure out what to do with it, but it was kind of interesting to find out what kinds of jobs they were doing and what the range of salaries were (really big).  He also asked which courses they found particularly useful and which were useless.  I was not surprised to hear that a number of courses were listed in both the “really useful” and “completely useless” categories by different students.

Peer Evaluation

Jeremy led a discussion on the difficult topic of how to evaluate individuals on team assignments.  There were lots of different strategies, but many of us agreed that explaining the evaluation strategy clearly to the students was key.  I’m going to leave further discussion of this topic to a later post because there are so many ways to look at it.

Online Discussion and Cooperative Learning

Nick has been experimenting with getting students more involved in learning using a cooperative approach.   For two of the “assignments” in his complexity course (C63), he asks students to post two problems on the bulletin board and then solve two different problems that other students have posed.  Marks are awarded for each component, and Nick tells the students as soon as possible what the marks are.

The advantages are that the students create lots of examples, there are lots of teaching opportunities, and everyone can learn from mistakes.  However, Nick found that he had to increase the incentive for students to actually cooperate and participate.  So he changed the marking scheme.  If a student got less that %50, that was just the mark they got, but if their raw mark was greater than %50, the mark they received was the average of their raw mark and the class average raw mark.

We ended the day with a discussion of proposed changes to the grading guidelines which seemed to be viewed by most as subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to inflate grades, and a short presentation and discussion of our initial steps towards revising the CS curriculum.

Conclusion

This is a long post, but it was a productive day.

Let the blogging begin…