Education

Level Up

By AMH

These Maker Skill Trees are awesome. They cover a mix of life (cleaning, cooking, travel), “classic” (knitting, woodworking, automotive), and tech (3D printing, Linux, mobile app development) skills and give a nice visual map of how you might progress in developing your skills through increasingly more advanced projects. For example, get started baking by making something with a packet mix or making brownies, moving towards making homemade marshmallow or cheesecake and eventually up to a wedding cake or croquembouche. The civics and community tree ranges from registering to vote through running for mayor. It could be fun to have my … Continue reading Level Up

What is coding help?

By AMH

With semesters starting, there’s another flurry of conversation about how to teach programming when students have access to generative AI tools. Much of it is about assessment, where the size and context of your class makes a big difference (I have options available to me in a 20 student in-person class taught in a room with dedicated computers I have instructor control of that many other people do not). However, there’s also discussion of how to help students use generative AI as an assistant as they learn. I’ve been thinking a lot about one tool I recently saw promoted that’s … Continue reading What is coding help?

SIGCSE 2024 Highlights

By AMH

I’ve been back in Portland, OR this past week at SIGCSE 2024 (“back” after attempting to have SIGCSE 2020 here and getting sent home before the main symposium began). For our fifth year running (including in March 2020!) the Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Education held our pre-symposium event “Innovations and Opportunities in Liberal Arts Computing Education” on Wednesday, with 41 people attending across the full day. I love the attendees we get at this event and the community that has built up around the committee – the conversation after all of the presentations and during our discussion … Continue reading SIGCSE 2024 Highlights

Pandemic teaching, round four, now with the Delta variant

By AMH

I have lots of thoughts about today, our first day into a semester that we’re hoping will be “back to normal” and yet very clearly isn’t. But my main feeling, at the end of it all, is that I actually feel like a teacher again. I suspect that if we had gone all-in on remote teaching, I might feel differently about the past year. But hybrid teaching, with its demands to provide both in person and remote students an equal experience, and the compromises that meant on both sides, left me feeling like I spent as much energy each class … Continue reading Pandemic teaching, round four, now with the Delta variant

Getting back into the flow of the school year

By AMH

Tomorrow is the start of our Fall 2020 schedule, pushed back a week from our original plan and now fully online for the first two weeks before transitioning to in-person instruction for those students who have returned to campus (or, from an instructor perspective, hybrid instruction as essentially all of us have some number of students studying remotely). I am, on paper, prepared. My CMS is loaded up with day-by-day details about what we’ll be doing so everyone can follow along. I’ve met individually with each student in my intermediate-level course to make sure they have the needed software installed … Continue reading Getting back into the flow of the school year

Wrapping up 19-20, launching into 20-21

By AMH

As of today, we are one day out from Virtual Commencement 2020, 14 days out from our annual faculty retreat (format TBA!), 16 days out from Matriculation, and 17 days out from the first day of the Fall semester. My to-do list is getting increasingly specific “Revise HW1”, “Add video sharing policy to syllabus”, though with some terrifyingly broad items still remaining like “Determine tutoring format” and “Create lab access policy”. But I did my last trip to campus today to make sure all of the seating and tables in our open social/study spaces are appropriately distanced and hung some … Continue reading Wrapping up 19-20, launching into 20-21

Planning for HyFlex – Initial Thoughts

By AMH

The announcement was made a couple of days ago that we’ll be back “in person” in the fall, for a revised definition of “in person” that includes knowing some students will still be remote and off campus entirely and some may need to be remote at times, either because they are exposed to the virus or because our classrooms simply cannot accommodate a full class all at once. While this isn’t surprising – it’s the sort of HyFlex model many schools are pursuing right now – now that it is known, we can start digging into the details and making … Continue reading Planning for HyFlex – Initial Thoughts

Spring 2020 Goals, Revisited

By AMH

Back in January I posted some goals for the Spring semester here, with the intention of revisiting them at the end of the term to see how I did. I was tempted to let myself off the hook, but I did have half a term during which things were relatively normal, and reflection is good, so let’s see how I did. Goal 1: Provide feedback as guidance more than correction in my object-oriented programming course. I think I did pretty well here. I definitely kept this in mind all semester; as I graded I tried to focus on whether there … Continue reading Spring 2020 Goals, Revisited

Adding Check-in Meetings to Projects

By AMH

One of the things I tried this semester for the first time was adding a mandatory one on one meeting with me for every student where I would review their progress on the final project. Having completed those meetings, I am very glad I chose to do them and think they were a huge contribution to the remote learning versions of my courses. I have mixed thoughts about whether I will continue them for in-person instruction. For my OO programming course, this was a major addition to the course and a big win. I’ve always counted on students dropping by … Continue reading Adding Check-in Meetings to Projects

An Upside to Text Chatting about Code

By AMH

I’ve slowed down on posting about the remote education situation because now most of the challenges have to do with supporting specific students. While these are still interesting challenges, being at a small school with small classes, any amount of detail about these situations can easily end up revealing personal information. So, take it as given – students are struggling in unique ways and individualized solutions need to be found. I think that’s universal to all of our courses right now. In terms of updates I can make, I noticed a nice benefit to having students use chat for problem … Continue reading An Upside to Text Chatting about Code