Summer Course Revisions 2021: CS222 Advanced Programming

At the time that the Fall schedule was being made, I had two outstanding grant proposals, either of which would have got me a course release for research projects. I figured I would get one or the other, so I was only assigned two courses in Fall. Well, neither came through, so the department kept their eyes on registration to see what they could assign me. About two weeks ago, I was assigned one of the sections of CS222 Advanced Programming, so this is a late addition to my summer contemplations.

This means I will have three "preps" in the Fall, which is not ideal, especially with other obligations: I am the department's P&T chair, I am on the committee that's running the CCSC:MW Conference, and I am the de facto conference chair for the Symposium on Games. I've already turned down other opportunities for fear of running myself ragged in the Fall. At least we're back to in-person classes, so it should not be quite so grueling as last Fall, when I had to teach three different classes an entirely different mode.

CS222 is a fun challenge to teach. Unfortunately, it was scheduled for MWF, which is not ideal for this class: longer, deeper sessions are much more beneficial to the students than the additional weekly contact. I do not think I can afford to give them daily assignments, which is my preference when it's a Tuesday-Thursday class, so I will have to pull back to weekly ones.

Looking over my notes from Spring, I should be able to make the changes mentioned there: including some kind of weekly check-in during the final project, and altering the "critical component" terminology. Those can both wait until the final project's articulation, so I do not have to worry about it now, only remember it. I am also looking at the summer enrichment exercise that I made for the outgoing Spring students, but I don't think I can reuse any of that for Fall. They were created to reinforce prerequisite knowledge presupposing knowledge from CS222, but of course, these incoming students won't have a clue what TDD is about. However, I do like the idea of drawing up some of the data structures content into the first three weeks of the class, especially so that I can try to determine if the same error modes are in place as were last semester, when the students clearly had not met the learning objectives of the prerequisite course.

I wrote about contemplating changes to the grading scheme in CS222, but I don't think this is the time to do that. My experience and interpretation is that the system works as designed for the vast majority of students, and that case I wrote about was a strange exception. I can catch such an exception if it comes up again.

I have already copied over the course site and made the superficial changes required. I hope to have the shell of the course site up by the end of the day, describing the first three weeks of the class.