Pedagogical Techniques Supported by the Use of Student Devices in Teaching Software Engineering Valentin Razmov, Richard Anderson {valentin, anderson}@cs.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle March 03, 2006 SIGCSE 2006 conference, Houston, TX

My Goals Inspire Involve Inform

Outline Background and motivation Why technology helps Activities in which you participate Each activity illustrating a pedagogical technique that is supported by technology Conclusions

Background Context Course we taught Pedagogical goals Software Engineering for junior and senior students of Computer Science Enrollments of up to 35 students Pedagogical goals Active student involvement and interaction Support for diversity of opinions Especially important in “soft” subjects

Background: Classroom Presenter Classroom interaction system Built for use with Tablet PCs Two main classroom usage scenarios: Instructors can annotate (and later save) slides in ink Instructors can pose problems (on slides) that students respond to by writing on slides and submitting their work anonymously Classroom Presenter is freely available for educational purposes

Activity: Perception of Amount Learned vs. Time Assume you are learning a new skill. How does your perception of the amount learned change with time? Your perception of how much you have learned - Pedagogical goals: creating an atmosphere for engagement, emphasizing the value of diverse opinions - Drawing or sketching seems more natural as an opening activity to a class session than a deep philosophical question - Activity could be related to the course content; e.g., a short-answer question Time Student Submission

Why Technology is Key? Gives instructor instant access to content from a broad range of students … not just from the few vocal students Increases instructor’s awareness of student ideas Enables instructor to immediately integrate student content into the lecture discussion Using actual examples of student work improves feedback Gives students a stake in constructing new knowledge Doing all this anonymously

Activity: Testing Emphasis How much does each $1 invested in early defect tracking save the project later on? $0.25 $1.00 $7.00 $50.00 What does that imply for how much emphasis you need to put on testing? - Pedagogical goals: student feedback to instructor (on their level of understanding), gauging student intuition, eliciting misconceptions - First part can be done quickly with a polling feature and histogram generation Student Submission

Activity: Software Engineering vs. Other Engineering How is software engineering different from other engineering disciplines? - Pedagogical goals: expression of diverse opinions, brainstorming, giving feedback on student ideas Student Submission

Activity: What are Your Options If You Fall Behind Schedule? - Pedagogical goals: expression of diverse opinions, brainstorming, giving feedback on student ideas, collaborative learning - best done in groups - cognitive difficulty (for unconstrained free-form answers) of figuring out on the spot what all the student answers collectively indicate -- even short descriptions of algorithms, proofs, etc., can pose a challenge Student Submission

Activity: Influence Diagrams Third world population Testing vs. stress Availability of food and health care Amount of testing done - Pedagogical goals: collaborative learning - done preferably in teams of 2-3 Survival rate of children Pressure felt Number of children in the family Errors made Student Submission

Distinguishing Aspects from Related Work Anonymity of student work Classroom Presenter is designed strictly for feedback in class, not for evaluation Student submissions In ink: a rich free-form expression Non-aggregated

Impact of Technology On instructors: On students: Encourages instructors to: First define the learning goals Then, decide how to assess if those goals are achieved Finally, design the necessary activities / content Challenge of creating activities that are both supportive of learning and can be easily evaluated on the spot (i.e., have low cognitive load) On students: Observed high rates of participation, ample classroom discussion => engagement Distraction is possible and does occur Assessing learning outcomes is future work

Conclusions Existing technology can: Help promote student engagement and openness to diversity of ideas Enable instructors to quickly gather and give feedback in class Results may apply in other disciplines Not limited to software engineering

Activity: One-Minute Feedback What 1-2 ideas discussed today captured your attention and thinking the most? What questions still remain open for you? Be specific. - Pedagogical goals: student feedback to the instructor - best done last in a class session; no need to immediately go over the responses in front of the class Student Submission

Questions? References: Acknowledgements: Contact info Valentin Razmov (valentin@cs.washington.edu) and Richard Anderson (anderson@cs.washington.edu) Classroom Presenter-related Downloads: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/ Papers: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/papers.html Software Engineering education-related Papers: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/valentin/sw-eng-papers.html Acknowledgements: HP Classroom Presenter is built on top of the ConferenceXP research platform. This work was supported in part by grants from External Research and Programs, Microsoft Research.