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Posts Tagged ‘students’

Some Thoughts on Motivating Students

December 2nd, 2011 by Martin No Comments

A computer science student of mine (Martin Perebner) had an interesting idea on how to motivate students. Basically, he stated, experimentation with new technologies can serve as motivation. Put differently: students are motivated, if they have the freedom to do things the way they like. I gave this some thought and there a few things that need additional considerations.

First of all, this works mostly with “responsible” students: they have already a good knowledge of available technologies and are able to work on their own. Students, that do not know technology that well, run the risk of failing: they become lost, because of their “freedom”. In my experience nothing can frighten students more than saying:

you can decide on your own how to do your project. Your goal is to do “A” (A begin an abstract description like “implementing a crowd sourced service registry on mobile devices that follows the village paradigm”) and you have to find your “path” through the project on your own.

This leads immediately to confusion, because students are sometimes not able to see the bigger picture. They simply do not know enough to truly understand their assignments. This is by no means due the a lack of intelligence, but simply due to a lack of knowledge.

Second of all, as a supervisor you have some requirements for the work of students. If they simply experiment with technology, but fail to produce something in the end, what do you do? Punish them for experimenting by failing them? Or give them credits for their “experiments”? I guess, this depends on the assignment: if their assignment was to implement a Service registry and they end up with a game, well then it is difficult to give them credits for this “creative” approach. After all, if you go into a supermarket and pay for a bottle of milk you won’t be happy if you get a pizza instead.

So, as supervisor you have to cope with a difficult situation: details make assignments boring, “mechanical”, whereas more abstract assignments and “freedom” can easily confuse students. The way I see it, the solution to this is not easy: it requires flexibility form supervisors in order to accept unintended results (pizza instead of milk) and lots of responsibility from students (more than they are probably aware of) to do things the way they like.

your ikangai university team

Realizations

November 26th, 2011 by Martin No Comments

Students have a hard life these days. They struggle through university lectures and exams. After several years of learning they end up with a degree and some wonder what they have done all those years…

That being said, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that students have an opportunity to learn lots of different things for (almost) free. Later, in the job life, the very same students end up paying the very same people for (weekend) seminars lots of money. Let me give an example: I’ll attend a two day university course on presentation techniques. This is very important these days: you must be able to present your work to others so that they understand your work. If you do this in your job, you quickly pay 2000 € for weekend seminars on presentation skills.

That is why I am often wondering whether students realize the opportunity they have: they can devote much of their time to study. University can give them so much, but in my experience the majority of students just consider their studies as obstacle they must overcome to have a degree and later earn money.

What I’m asking of students is to realize the opportunity they have at their hands: students can experiment in a safe environment without bothering too much about financial consequences of their projects. This is difficult when working in companies, where the work must pay off and there is little room for experiments.

But there is also the university that can do a better job communicating students their opportunities. It could start with regular meetings with students where they can discuss with lectures – just like I did with my students and thus involving students more in university life.

your ikangai university team

At Your Service [UPDATE]

November 9th, 2011 by Martin No Comments

As I already discussed in a recent blog entry, working with students is interesting and always full of surprises. Sometimes, I am caught in negotiations with students about the work they should do. Recently, I asked a student to write a short (eight to ten pages) report on his project to prove that he has done programming work. Basically, I was asking for a report about activities that you (should) do in a software project: requirements analysis, the motivation for the project and some technical details about the work. Nothing outrageous, I believe. However, the student started a negotiation and asked if the subversion commit log is enough proof for his work. Truth be told, first I was baffled and then amused. Apparently, when I supervise students I am the one who should do the work and the students tell me what to do:

“What can I do for you that you get the credit points for your project? Wait, let me write the report. Now, even better: let me do the actual work. Just tell me what to do and will do it. Just send me your log files and I will do the rest. Thank you Sir!”

your ikangai science team

[UPDATE]
I was contacted by the student and we had a brief EMail conversation and clarified some mutual misunderstandings. It seems, that I misinterpreted his EMail: it was not his intention that I should do his work by analyzing the log files. He meant to provide the log files in addition to his project description. This is of course perfectly ok.

Students – A Lamento

October 31st, 2011 by Martin No Comments

With the end of contract with university in one month, I spend some time reflecting on the experiences with students that I supervised. Generally speaking, working with students can be challenging. If is difficult not to forget that students are still learning how to do things while at the same time they should be able to produce results.

Personally, I found it very interesting that after students attended lectures on scientific working they all struggled with the actual scientific process. Apparently, when writing their Bachelor Thesis, nine out of ten students did not really know what a reference is. They did not know where to look for related work and showed little interest in doing so. The overall quality of the work also differed: some provided me with texts that where written like essays on some personal experience that find with 5th graders: “By coincidence I found the Web page of my advisor Martin Treiber…”. Others contained hilarious Germanisms like “The system consists of public and private parts”.

Others (the minority) produced work that was good, but still not excellent. However, some of the good students could have produced excellent work. They did not, because apparently there is no incentive to produce excellent work. I can only speculate, but I believe that a part of the reason for this is the overall culture at university. At university, we seem not to be able to motivate good students to do more that needed in order to produce something excellent. I think that lectures need greater flexibility when working with excellent students. For example, to be able to give excellent works extra credit points. Or put the work on the Web page of the university with some praise for the work.

Maybe competitions for the best student work can help to motivate students. To be fair, my university did already implement a part of this rewarding scheme for the best Master Thesis. However, it appears that students see this as additional burden for finishing their studies. It is not considered as opportunity to present their work and show it to a broader public. This is a bit surprising, because students sometimes complain that their work disappears in some drawer for good.

So, what is my recommendation for students? It is simple, but hard to do. I highly recommend to think of university studies as once in a lifetime opportunity to learn. Enjoy every single day and learn new things. Never forget: at university you have time to experiment and learn new technology. Later, you don’t.

your ikangai university team

Transforming lazy Students to hard-working Students with Copy and Paste

June 16th, 2011 by Martin No Comments

People like to make shortcuts. If there is a possibility of achieving the same result with less effort, people will do this. When teaching students, these shortcuts are often called cheating – people copy the work from others and paste it into their own work. This can be observed, for example, in Programming Lab assignments for computer science students. Here, students simply copy existing source codes from different sources (other students, web sites) and integrate it into their work – without mentioning these sources. Teachers are then required to check the work of students for plagiarisms. This can be time-consuming, and checking students’ work for copied code is not very exiting. Even with tool support able to automate these checks, the basic problem remains that people simply copy from others for their own benefit. From the perspective of the creator, this is particularly frustrating: his work goes uncredited, and there are no benefits from others copying his work (and sometimes getting away with this).
I propose to take a radically different approach: instead of trying to make it as difficult as possible for students to copy, make it as easy as possible for students to copy (and integrate) the work of others into their own. Students that copy are NOT punished, but are REQUIRED to mark the copied portions in their work. This is very similar to citations in scientific work: acknowledge the work of others, who in turn get a better reputation by an increasing citation count. With students it is the same: students get extra points for their Lab assignments if their work is “cited”, i.e., copied by other students. The more the work of a students gets copied (and used) by other students, the better for the creator.
A side effect of this approach is that only potentially useful (well written, well documented) code is reused by others. Consequently, the incentive is to produce code that has a high potential of being copied by others. However, the problem of copy cats remains with this approach as well: a student could copy code, pretend that the code is his and publish it for others to copy. I believe that this can be overcome by the attitude of students when it comes to their own work. Based on my experience, students tend to be very alert and immediately notice when others copy their work without crediting. This kind of peer pressure can be used to prevent unnoticed copying.
Still, there must be some kind of assessment for the work of a student, otherwise students would simply copy and get a grade. One solution is that students must be able to explain the source code to teachers when they present the solution of their Lab assignments. Alternatively, students can take complementary lab exams, in which students are asked theoretical questions.
I believe that this approach can be very exiting and students can learn a lot in such a system: they learn how to respect the work of others, to give the creators credit and do things like commenting code and making the code useful for others.

your ikangai science team

Student Workshop on Crowd Sourcing

February 22nd, 2011 by Martin No Comments

We have started to work on a concept for a workshop on crowd sourcing. Our goal is to make a two-part workshop for students who are working on projects (internships, Bachelor Thesis, Diploma Thesis) related to crowd sourcing. Part one of the workshop will introduce the theoretical background on crowd sourcing and discuss existing scientific work. The theoretical part will take place at the Distributed Systems Group and is scheduled for one day. During this day, students will have the opportunity to get an overview of the current scientific state of the art in crowd sourcing. During this workshop day, there will be two or three research presentations, followed by discussions and brainstorming sessions. The brainstorming is aimed to give students the opportunity to explain their projects to others, and to discuss challenges with other students.
The second part – the coding week – will take place at a different location (we are thinking of the Ulbinghof Farm in Carinthia in Untergreuth near lake Faakersee) and last one week (five working days). During this week, students can work intensively on their projects and implement the concepts and ideas that were discussed during the theoretical part of the crowd sourcing workshop. The kickoff for the coding week will be about ten days after the theoretical workshop – this gives all participants enough time to think of theoretical background and its implications for their own projects.
A major benefit for students will be that they can cover about a third of the work for an internship (Praktikum) – just by participating in this workshop. The participation is free of charge for students. Students will stay at self-catering apartments during the coding week and the travel expenses will be covered. The location (Ulbinghof) allows for spare time activities like hiking, (mountain-)biking or swimming. The only thing that is left is to find a concrete date for the workshop so that the students can participate.
The bad news is that we, i.e. ikangai, need funding. We are looking for sponsors and will also invest some of our own money in this workshop.

your ikangai science team