Transcript Project Work in the Computing Curriculum Sally Fincher 15th Annual NACCQ conference Hamilton, New Zealand 3-5 July 2002 www.ukc.ac.uk.

Project Work in the
Computing Curriculum
Sally Fincher
15th Annual NACCQ conference
Hamilton, New Zealand
3-5 July 2002
www.ukc.ac.uk
EPCoS
Effective Projectwork in Computer Science (EPCoS)
•
•
•
•
UK funded project (250k UKP)
3 years (1997-2000)
10 institutions
Effective Project Work in Computer Science: Principles
and Pragmatics, Springer-Verlag 2001
‹#›
Why projects?
• Learn something we can’t teach – but we want them to
know
• Process
• extended period of time, pts, possible methodology prescribed
• Product
• often integrative of many aspects of previous curriculum
(“capstone”), written and oral communication skills. What is a
report, anyway?
• Industrial practice
• real projects, real clients, authentic experience, “authentic”
assessment, motivation
‹#›
Three features of project work
• Immersion
• Situation
• Location
‹#›
Immersion
• Projects are free from “normal” curricular timetabling &
contact constraints (no lectures, self-directed)
• Students are free to do what they will with their time &
material (and often spend far too much time doing so)
• Immersion can be seen in individual projects just as
much as team/group projects.
‹#›
Immersion (i)
‹#›
Immersion (ii)
‹#›
Immersion (iii)
“My research library was in a shipping container … rented
out for self-storage. I got the steel 8-by-8-by-40 foot
space for $250 a month and spent all of $1000 fixing it
up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch,
and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was
heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-inprogress—all the notes, tapes, 5x8 cards, photos,
negatives, magazine articles, 450 books and other
research oddments laid out by chapters or filed
carefully”
Stewart Brand How Buildings Learn, 1994
‹#›
Immersion (iv)
‹#›
Educational Examples
• Individual “Research-type” projects – from final-year
undergraduate to PhD
• Design-and-build projects (typically in groups and of a
semester or more duration)
‹#›
Three features of project work
• Immersion
• Situation
• Location
‹#›
Situation
• Students have to learn differently when doing project
work
• If “situated learning” (Lave & Wenger) is an effective
way to learn, can we use this in a more formal
educational setting?
• The (frequent) interdisciplinary nature of project work
combats the artificiality of the regular educational
setting. Curricula divisions often have to be abandoned
• Project work is always contextualised
‹#›
Educational example: Aalborg
• Traditionally, higher education has been focussed on
rule-based disciplines with independent identities in
their own contexts
• Problem-oriented education, however, is based on
working with unsolved, relevant and current problems
from society/real life, e.g. the engineers' professional
activity in an environment where solutions to real
problems are sought.
• By analysing the problems in depth the students learn
and use the disciplines and theories which are
considered to be necessary to solve the problems
posed, i.e. the problem defines the subjects and not
the reverse.
‹#›
Problem-oriented project work
The practical problem
can be a symptom that
something is wrong with
our theories and
assumptions, and thus
the practical problem
produces a theoretical
problem as to why there
is a practical problem
http://www.auc.dk/fak-tekn/aalborg/engelsk/problem.html
‹#›
Other educational examples
• PJ300
• Genesis at University of Sheffield
‹#›
Three features of project work
• Immersion
• Situation
• Location
‹#›
Location
• Classroom extension (catch-as-catch-can – may have
features of immersion, may not)
• Maximal colocation (also called radical colocation –
“project rooms”, “war rooms”)
• Distributed teams
‹#›
Radical colocation
“One site collected productivity measures on the six
teams that we observed, as they do with all their
software engineering teams. The measures allowed a
comparison of these groups with the company norm,
which showed the company already well above (better
than) the national average. The results were
remarkable: they produced double the function points
per unit of staff time compared to the corporate
average. They cut the total time to market (per function
point) by two thirds, with none of the groups, again,
even near the corporate average”
Gary Olson & Judith Olson Distance Matters
HCI 2000 vol 15 pp 139-178
‹#›
Why does this work?
• could move from one sub-group to another
• “overhearing” gave awareness
• 42 flip charts over 6 weeks
•
•
•
•
common referent (by gesture or glance)
maintains critical information
place for examining interactions and planning for new events
record of chronology of ideas or associatively meaningful
clusters
‹#›
Educational example: Roskilde
• Pedagogy was a crucial part of the experiment:
lectures, fixed syllabuses, examinations and strict
admission criteria were swept away.
• There was to be consistent implementation of project
pedagogy at Roskilde University; students were to
select topics that interested them and to carry out the
work in groups.
• A project would be continuously assessed,
examinations would not be necessary
‹#›
Roskilde “houses”
The project groups were organised in "houses",
administrative and physical units that contained about
60 students, 5-6 teachers and a secretary during the
first years. Working together, the teachers and students
of the house decided on the themes for the project
work. The intention was that the teachers' research,
which was to deal with the same subjects as the
students' project work, should take place in
cooperation with the students.
http://www.ruc.dk/ruc_en/about/RU-history/
‹#›
Other examples
• Monash “studio-based”
• Very short-term “projects” – one day, one week
• “students need to be in the lab and part of the activity
there”
Prof Ian Witten, NACCQ 2002
‹#›
But is it “authentic”?
• What we expect of project work
• What we expect/assume of industrial practices
• Distributed teams - potentially globally distributed
‹#›
Educational example: Runestone
• Different specialities
• Different countries (and therefore different time zones)
• Different cultures
http://www.docs.uu.se/docs/runestone/
Have to deal with:
• Technological challenges
• “Common ground”
• Context & trust
‹#›
Culture
“Mangers start with sweet talk – the top of the hamburger
bun. Then the criticism is slipped in – the meat. Finally,
some encouraging words – the bottom bun. With the
Germans, all one gets is the meat. With the Japanese,
all one gets is the buns; one has to smell the meat”
E.S. Browning, Wall Street Journal 3 May 1994 Side by side:
Computer chip project brings rivals together, but the cultures
clash
‹#›
Educational example
“Brace yourself for problems. Do your work in time (an
golden oldie, that one). Yes, when an American says I
can do all this, it means in Swedish : I will try my best
(but no success guarantied)”
Mary Last, reporting student comment from the Runestone
project, 1st CSERGI workshop, 1998
‹#›
Back to more basic things …
• Lots of ways to integrate project work. Immersion,
Situation and Location are useful ways to think about
what’s going on, but not very useful when designing
instances of project work in educational settings.
•Assessment
•Supervision
•Allocation
•Team/group projects
•Reflection
•Motivation
‹#›
How to find things out: how to use things
• In EPCoS we developed a projectwork “map”
• Great for us
• Pretty useless for anyone else
• Bundles
•
•
•
•
•
Problem Statement
This bundle is …
The way it works is …
It works better if … (It doesn’t work unless …)
Solution Statement
‹#›
Red Card/Yellow Card (aka “La Coupe du
Monde 1998”)
Red card / yellow card (Give them a management tool)
Students and staff alike are reluctant to reward group
members who do not contribute. (Although some
groups are perfectly happy to “carry” a hitch-hiker). In
either case, it is impossible for staff to know precisely
how much work each team member did: only the
students involved know this.
‹#›
Bundle body
• This bundle gives students some control over the behaviour of
members of their project group and allows their non-performance
to be factored into assessment.
• The way it works is that students are allowed to issue others in
their project group with yellow, and in extremis, red cards. A
yellow card is “shown” to a student who is deficient in effort or
attitude or in other ways not making a full contribution to the group
and is then lodged with the project supervisor. Being “shown a
yellow card” results in a known penalty being applied to the
student (for example a fixed number of marks lost), though a
yellow card may be cancelled by increased effort, or at a boundary
between phases of the project, or after a set time. A student who
attracts the maximum number of yellow cards can be “shown a red
card”, which excludes the student from the rest of the project and
sets the mark awarded to zero. There is no recovery from a red
card.
‹#›
Bundle conditionals
• It works better if staff set the parameters of control (the
penalty, the number of yellow cards that can be
carried)
• It doesn’t work if the system leads to the frivolous use
of penalties. It doesn’t work unless day-to-day
management of the resource/role allocation is in the
hands of the group themselves.
‹#›
Solution statement – generalising the
particular
• So: find a mechanism which devolves some control
over the performance of group members to the groups
themselves.
‹#›
More of the same …
http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/national/EPCOS
‹#›