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

2. My Goals
Inspire
Involve
Inform

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. Questions? References: Acknowledgements:
Contact info
Valentin Razmov and
Richard Anderson
Classroom Presenter-related
Downloads:
Papers:
Software Engineering education-related
Papers:
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.