Post-Mortem

Today was the last day of the course, so we spent the morning talking about what had gone well and what had not. The high and low points were:

Good

• The course was fun.
• The TAs were fantastic.
• The format (one hour of lecture plus two hours of lab, twice a day) worked well.
• Enjoyed the parts where the instructors programmed live.
• Liked the emphasis on working practices that complement coding.
• Liked the spread of topics, and the variability of things that are useful in all the different fields.
• Liked the pair programming.
• Welcomed exposure to standard libraries that weren't necessarily covered in the course.
• Liked the pre-arrival questions about what people knew, were doing, and wanted from the course.
• The examples were good.
• So were the donuts.

Bad

• Three weeks is too long.
• Some of the later topics were not as useful.
• Would have preferred to use standard libraries for the image processing lecture and exercises instead of simplified libraries.
• Too little coverage of too many subjects.
• The formatting of the slides leaves much to be desired.
• Too many lectures ran over time (which was particularly hard in afternoon sessions).
• Divided attention in FriendFeed is a problem.
• The less applied stuff (e.g., computational complexity) wasn't as useful or as interesting.
• Students weren't given enough time to work on their own projects.
• Didn't feel encouraged to make suggestions or provide feedback.
• Not enough on shell programming.
• Too much shell programming.
• A/V between Toronto and Edmonton was crude by modern standards.

Changes

• More on object-oriented programming.
• More feedback on the students' solutions to the exercises–they didn't get the equivalent of grading.
• Put the exercises up before the class, so that students know what the lecture's going to be leading them to.

It's been a good three weeks–I enjoyed getting to know the students, and look forward to seeing what they do with what they've learned.