What We Learned in CS222: Spring 2020 Edition

For many years now, when teaching CS222, I have started the final exam by having the students make a list of what they learned. This small, reflective, timeboxed exercise is conveniently executed during a conventional final exam slot, and we normally then transition to compiling our lists. This compilation process starts out with students simply reciting what they have on their lists, but inevitably, one person's comment spurs the memory of another, and new ideas emerge that were not written down. It also can get a bit silly, in a very good way.

I wanted to keep as much of this exercise in tact as I could despite the closing of campus. I ended up creating a final assignment for the students, due on the last regular meeting day of class, in which they each had to post a list of what they learned to a Canvas discussion board. Canvas discussion boards have an interesting feature in which you can prevent students from seeing others' posts until they themselves post, and this seemed the right option for the assignment. The result is that each student got to share an unadulterated list for their classmates to see. Unfortunately, this lost the fun of compiling the list together, but at least it got the reflective part.

I went through all of the posts and compiled a spreadsheet to count what was most common. Of course, there was a possibility of interpretive error here, but I think on the whole that it is representative. I only found one item among all those shared that I couldn't really classify at all. In the end, I counted 73 distinct learning outcomes. Here are the top six, with their number of occurrences:

• Clean Code (9)
• Single-Responsibility Principle (8)
• Test-Driven Development (8)
• Model-View Separation (7)
• GitHub (7)
• Making GUIs in JavaFX (6)

This is not significantly different from a normal semester's outcome. The ones most often mentioned tend to be the generic ones, such as "Clean Code," whereas specific Clean Code practices or theories are less frequently represented (and counted separately). Curiously, items relating to distributed development were sparse. Many people wrote about working on a team, but only one explicitly mentioned remote collaboration.

That's enough blogging for today, since I already wrote up my reflection on the Spring 2020 Game Studio this morning. I expect I will be back tomorrow with a reflection on the CS222 course.