What we learned in CS 222, Largent's Fall 2017 edition

My colleague, Paul Gestwicki designed our CS 222: Advanced Programming course. He first taught it during the fall 2010 semester. Most semesters since then, he has blogged about an exercise performed as a final exam to identify what the students felt they learned during the course. You may review his fall 2017 blog entry, if you wish.  I've had the pleasure of teaching the course since fall 2015. Having just started to blog this fall, this is my first opportunity to create a blog post similar to Paul's. So here goes...

The final exam process for CS 222 consists of three parts. First, the students are asked to list everything they can think of that they learned--directly or indirectly--because of their participation in CS 222 this semester. Once the consolidated list is compiled (and cleaned of duplicates), each student has a limited number of votes to cast to identify the items they feel are the most significant. And lastly, each student then selects one of the items which received the most votes and writes a reflective essay about how they learned that item.

The consolidated list contained 103 items (after removing duplicates). Each student had seven votes to cast for the items they felt were the most significant for them. Because of a tie for seventh place, we included eight items in our "Top N List," which ended up including these items:

• Clean code techniques (15)
• TDD (15)
• Stack overflow (14)
• It’s easier to take the time to write cleanly than to write dirty code and fix it later. (8)
• Code is like art. Anyone can look at code and call it beautiful, but it’s rare to find someone who can tell you why. (7)
• Time-management is a key factor in a lot of things (7)
• Consider what the needs of the end user are when developing functions, rather than developing functions based on satisfying your own goals for your application. (5)
• Navigation of GitHub (5)

The students in Paul's fall 2017 section of the course developed this list:

• TDD (13)
• Good names (12)
• Refactor vs. Redesign (7)
• Self-reflection (7)
• git (6)
• Objects vs. Data Structures (6)
• Time management (6)

Comparing the two lists, I see many similarities. Both lists include references to clean code, TDD, Git, and time management. As Paul mentions in his blog post, clean code and TDD are major themes of the course, both of which are completely new concepts to the students. As such, they struggle with them. Similarly the use of Git and GitHub is new to virtually all students, and causes its own challenges, until they take the time to figure it out. Time management is a common issue students (and many of us!) have; seldom are they able to accurately estimate how much time it will take to develop their projects. Because of the nature of the course (with some limited scaffolding we "throw them in the deep end of the pool and ask them to swim"), it is not surprising that students would feel the use of Stack Overflow is significant.

I found the "Code is like art." item a bit interesting. One of the course's essential questions is "What is software craftsmanship?" Perhaps the discussions we held about that throughout the semester struck a chord with some of the students more than I realized. User needs versus your own project goals was an item I've not had show up before, but it may reflect a few of the groups' experiences when they performed user acceptance testing.

There were a few items that I found interesting but didn't receive enough votes to make the "Top N List."

• How much I’ve learned since CS 120
• Reflecting on yourself can prove to be useful
• Must make an effort to learn from past mistakes the first time I make them
• Asking for help and needing help are two different animals

These items all focus on learning, and our human tendencies; what has been, is being, and will be learned, and our inclination to avoid doing what we need to do to learn. The fact that a few students observed this in themselves, and a few even felt it was significant (as evidenced by a few votes) is a good thing.

Comparing the course grades of this semester's students to those of the spring semester, the grades appeared to drop, though not what I'd consider significantly. There were fewer As, more Bs and Cs, and fewer Ds.

	Spring 2017	Fall 2017
A	52%	42%
B	41%	48%
C	3.5%	10%
D	3.5%	0%
F	0%	0%

I did change how grades were calculated this semester, having switched to utilizing specifications grading, but the assessable items did not change--only how they were evaluated. I reflected on my experiences with this transition in my previous blog entry. Some of the over all grade change might be attributed to this, and may be reflecting a slightly more accurate representation of learning and effort than the previous point system, which tended to "average" my assessment of their learning. The students did show evidence of learning and growth in their final exam reflective essays.