What We Learned in CS222, Spring 2022 edition

This post continues a long tradition of sharing students' responses to the open-ended question, "What did you learn in CS222 this semester?" However, before I dive into the two sections' responses, I need to note that I made a last-minute change in my protocol this year. For ten years, with a few changes around the pandemic, I used a three act structure for the final exam, a portion of which asked the students to make a list of what they have learned. This semester, that didn't feel like the right thing to do. Partially, this is because a few things have happened this semester that I have not written about publicly, but they have left me feeling uneasy. Another reason is that I recently added a "content" portion to the final exam to complement the "reflection" portion, but I realized last Fall that the exam had grown a bit too large for its timeslot. Finally, I also know that change is in the air, as I am not on deck to teach CS222 at all next academic year: my time will be devoted to help spin up the new Game Design and Development concentration in my department. Based on these factors, I decided to move the exercise slightly earlier in the semester.

The exercise itself was still basically the same, but instead of doing it during the final exam, I did in the penultimate day of class, as part of my conclusion to the course. I started by having them create mindmaps on the theme of "programming," which they did on the first day of class as well. Then we launched into a 15-minute timeboxed exercise in logging what we learned. 

One of the problems I alluded to above has been the noticeable lack of attendance. A lot of students are simply not coming to class meetings, or coming with such infrequency that they may as well not be there at all. In the meetings today, which I had announced would be my semester wrap-up, we had eleven people in the first section. That is more than I have seen in three weeks. In the second section, we had only six, which is more than the five that usually show up. An output of the exercise is, essentially, a question on the final exam, and I have no problem letting the people who show up determine on what they will be tested.

The first section came up with 79 items, and so I gave them each three votes. These are the items that received any votes.

• DRY (3)
• GitHub (3)
• Red-Green-Refactor (3)
• Version Control (3)
• TDD (2)
• SRP (2)
• Time Management (2)
• Parameterized Tests (2)
• Java (1)
• Teamwork (1)
• Clean Code (1)
• User Stories (1)
• JavaFX (1)
• JSON (1)
• Abstraction (1)
• Inheritance (1)
• Discipline (1)
• Polymorphism (1)
• Model-View Separation (1)
• Documentation (1)
• Wrapper classes (1)

The second section came up with 52 items, and I also gave them three votes apiece. Here is the subset that received any votes.

• TDD (3)
• Clean Code (3)
• DRY (3)
• SMART (2)
• Model-View Separation (2)
• JavaFX (1)
• Retrospective Meetings (1)
• Groupwork (1)
• Good names (1)
• Showing up to class is important (1)

Oh, that last one is too ironic for me on the last Friday of classes.