readme:james's blog

Creative Computing (the department I'm in at at Coventry University), just had the feedback from the external examiner.

It's all good. Our teaching of programming, especially, was praised. I won't copy sections of the report verbatim, but it did include words like "acclaim", "innovative", "motivated", "superior" (of results, deservedly and in comparison to similar institutions), "novel" and "successful". :)

It's good to get some external feedback, to be honest. Although the other members of the department have been very supportive and positive of the way we've taught programming this year, you can't help wondering if they're just too polite to say "WTF are you doing?".

The key features of our approach aren't particularly strange, really. We used Python (after many years of Java), objects late (shock!), did graphics and games in the first half of the academic year (and saw some great student work because of it), etc.

Perhaps the biggest difference from previous years, though, was the number of exercises we gave to the students. They did lots of programming, but thanks to our studio system, they had plenty of supported time to do them in.

Oh, and we walked into each lecture with no slides. Just a Knoppix CD and the intention of rolling up our sleeves and coding in front of a live audience. The ability to modify the examples, fix the occasional intentional typo (and more than occasional unintentional one) and generally respond to queries made a difference to the way lectures worked. They were more relaxed, more interactive and I think the students got a lot more out of them. I know I did - it was a lot of fun.

# posted by Digehode @ 12:25 pm