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Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

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

Agile Student Management with SCORE

April 28th, 2011 by Martin No Comments

Teaching (undergraduate) students is a time consuming activity when working at an university. The support of students during their projects requires typically between one and two meetings per week, and the scheduling of meetings is sometime difficult – even with prescheduled sessions once a week. Students work alone on their projects and projects last a whole semester, in some cases two.
As a matter of fact, this approach is limited to a certain number of students (in our experience around seven to ten) which can be handled in such a manner, before working days become too fragmented and inefficiently used. Another side-effect of mere student to teacher interactions is that hard-earned lessons were not shared effectively among students – because they simply did not know of other students that encountered similar or related problems when working on their projects. Simply put: most student work in isolation and deal with their problems alone, rather then sharing their problems and ideas and collaborate with other students.
To overcome this communication barrier, we started a blog in June 2010 and encouraged students to blog about their projects. Depending on the project complexity we asked for four to six blog entries that describe the progress of their projects. At first, students did not really know what to post and how to present their results. This is related to the fact that computer science students are not used to write about their work. Most appear to prefer to program; writing about their programs and documenting their progress was considered more as burden than as opportunity to try and learn how present their work in a “protected environment”.
The reason for this is that during the study, students simply do not need to write essays and thus have difficulties writing descriptions of their work for others to understand. However, when asked, they agreed that it is important to have such skills when working later for companies and that blogging can be a training ground for writing master thesis.
A typical blog posts contain technical descriptions (e.g., class diagrams), links to resources, workarounds, specific problem descriptions when using third party libraries or installation tutorials. The observed writing style is casual, often blog posts begin with a simple “Hello, my name is” and students (not being English native speakers) tend to make a number of grammar mistakes. We address this issue by a crowdsourced approach where we ask other students working on projects for comments on recent blog posts of their colleagues and to help them to find grammar mistakes. As of April 2011, our students did post 175 blog entries on 26 (ongoing) projects. As additional motivation, we invited students to create screen-casts of their work which we publish on youtube (nine videos online as of April 2011). This gives other students an overview on projects that were done by students.
In November 2010, after reading an article in the CACM, we adopted a modified version of scrum for research (SCORE) which we combined with our existing blog writing approach. We schedule regular meetings (two to three times a month) in which students give a short overview of their recent and future activities. During the first meetings, we observed a typical supervisor/student relationship: the supervisor sat in the middle of the group an asked each student clockwise to report the current project status. There was no discussion and students appeared reluctant to discuss their work in public. Some students also found it difficult to abstract from their work to explain other students their work. Some provided detailed descriptions of specific problems of their work. While low level discussions of technical details are valuable in supervisor/student discussions, they are obviously counter productive when discussing this in a bigger group. In such cases the supervisor had to intervene
and to give a short summary of the work from a more abstract level for the other students to understand.
To overcome fragmentation and to foster a discussion between students, we give our students related projects to work on. For example, one student builds a Tweetflow parser for Android, while another builds a graphical Tweetflow editor for Android. In some cases, we give students the same topic to work on, albeit on different platforms (e.g., browser plugin, iPhone).
As a final measure, we provide a Twitter user list, which we use to inform students about SCORE meetings and provide information like links to papers or ask them for reading and correcting blog entries of other students. The Twitter user list is considered as a virtual social center for students, which is used to inform students on 24/7 about work related and “other things”. Since the introduction of the Twitter list, the adoption of Twitter was a mixed success: almost all of our students did not use Twitter before (they had heard of it) and until now (April 2011) students show reluctance in using Twitter. A typical question was: “I do not know what to tweet”, which we had experienced with blogging before. We tried to overcome this barrier with the introduction of a dedicated syntax for Tweets based on Tweetflows. In a first step, we asked students to log their activities on Twitter with

LG didDo.Something date=dd.mm.yyyy&duration=hhmm #hashtag

This has been taken up by 9 students (out of 17 active students working on projects). We also introduced a syntax to ask for “help” of other students on Twitter which is inspired by Human Provided Services (HPS). In particular, students can ask for a “service” like proofreading a blog entry by tweeting

SR proofread.Blogentry https://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/staff/treiber/blog/ #Tweetflows #Android

Like the activity log, we use a Tweetflow syntax which can be parsed by dedicated Twitter clients. This structuring of Tweets also helped students to overcome a initial communication barrier and gave them a starting point. As said before, the initial adoption was even slower than blogging, but the shortness of Tweets began to motivate students to use Twitter more.
The upshot after ten months of blogging, five months of SCORE meetings and three months of Twitter is that students started to adopt a lightweight agile approach, after some initial reluctance. Due to the overlapping project topics, a weak sense of community has also emerged between students. We observed some discussions between students during SCORE meetings and some students helped each other with technical problems. It helped us to confine the otherwise fragmented student meetings to a single afternoon once a week which appears to us rather efficient.
We will continue with this system and will extend the limited tool support. In particular, we will develop a Tweetflow plugin for wordpress which works in a similar manner like SOYLENT and integrates the SCORE student community directly into wordpress for proofreading. Furthermore, we are going to develop Android clients that are able to parse and generate SCORE related Tweetflow requests, supporting the information flow between students.

your ikangai science team