This semester's CS222 class was unlike any other. My department is once again involved in a 1+2+1 program with a Chinese university, meaning that Chinese students complete their first undergraduate year in China, their next two years in the USA, and then their final year back in China, culminating in dual degrees. It was a vibrant program many years ago, and I am glad to see that it has come back. In the Spring semester, I had all of the eligible 1+2+1 students in my section, which meant that half of my enrollment consisted of domestic students and half consisted of Chinese nationals. I used to have some in my classes, but I've never had half of the enrollment in a class be international students before. It meant that on most days, there were more native Chinese-speakers in the classroom than English-speakers.
One of the things I realized this semester is how often I speak in idioms, using phrases whose literal translations don't have an obvious meaning. For example, I told one of the teams that they had gotten "in a pickle." Then I laughed and wrote that expression on the board, gesturing to it and pointing out how ridiculous it was. I explained that it meant that the team had gotten themselves in trouble, possibly of their own creation.
Unfortunately, moments like this were not as powerful as I would have hoped. Turning to my class, the domestic students were smiling as they contrasted the literal and figurative meanings of the phrase, but almost all of my Chinese students were as they always are: eyes glued to their monitors or smartphones. A guest speaker's presentation allowed me to sit in the back of the room and verify my suspicion about what was going on: most of the students had their phones propped up on their laptops and were running voice translation software. They were not listening to the speaker in any significant sense but reading in Chinese what it thought the speaker was saying. Occasionally, a student would switch to the laptop to visit a site or verify a term, but mostly they were reading real-time translated transcriptions of what was spoken. Not all of them did this, but most did. Some listened and took notes. One watched Chinese television. In this way, they are not unlike domestic undergraduates.
As usual, we completed a major project lasting about 8 weeks, and it was split into three iterations. I gave lengthy feedback to each team's submission, and sometimes teams even read and responded to it. An unusual frustration from this semester was that none of the teams really nailed the final iteration. I expect 20% or fewer to get the process right the first time, and then maybe 40% on the second iteration, and I usually get 60% or better addressing the fundamentals by the third iteration. I didn't have that this time: each project had something fundamentally wrong that I had already pointed out to them in a previous iteration. One conclusion from this is that I may need to rearrange or remove some of the elective content from the class in favor of more supervised in-class practice. Another consideration, though, is that I hadn't accounted for the extra labor done by international teams. I strongly encouraged—but did not require—international project teams, and most of the teams were. This means that in addition to tackling the significant challenges of the course, which include trying to change habits and conceptual models around programming, these teams were also dealing with language and cultural differences. That work is real work but it was outside the grading scheme. When I laid out their final grades yesterday, I decided to add a flat boost to the international teams to compensate them for undertaking the challenge. The resulting grades looked more appropriate to me for how well I knew the relatively small class. If I were to teach another class with such a high proportion of international students, I would need to revisit the question of whether an up-front incentive might be fruitful.
Course achievements were once again counted as regular assignments rather than their own category, as I did last semester. I do think this works better since it lowers the cognitive load of the course. My department currently has unprecedented growth in student organizations, and I need to bring back some of the achievements related to those.
Counting achievements as a regular assignment has helped students navigate that part of the class, but I have yet to crack the problem that many students who ought to resubmit work don't do it. The idea is that students resubmit work until they have shown an understanding of it, and I am not sure what impedes students from doing this. It's possible that it's too liberal for Canvas to handle. Canvas won't tell them that something is due because they can resubmit any past assignment once per week. I suppose I could make a separate weekly resubmission assignment, which may solve the problem that some students fail to understand what "one per week" means. It feels like catering to their LMS addiction to me, but maybe it's what they need to help them through the challenging content.
I'm still stuck on the question of whether the content of the course would work well as a portfolio. Take a principle like naming: I could require students to submit in a portfolio an evaluation of something they wrote before 222 (which I do as an assignment) along with a sample of work that demonstrates their following the principles. Such a portfolio would be a powerful testament to what they have learned, but I've struggled to figure out how to pace such a thing. When I first started using achievements in CS222, all the assignments were from a grab bag of achievements, and in many ways, it was a portfolio-style assessment. As I put more emphasis on the project, I had to put that aside. I mention it here in part because, as I understand it, the 2026-2027 academic year will see a transition from a 15-week to a 14-week semester here. That will require me to blow up the course and rebuild it since there's no way I could just trim a few things out and have the rhythm still match.
The last note I'll mention here is something from my planning document, where I keep short notes about how things went and what I want to change the following year. This year, I had several teams undertake projects whose nature did not fit the requirements of the final project. The reasons undoubtedly come from a combination of background, culture, language, and generational differences. To cut to the chase, I realized I need to make it even more explicit that the final project needs to do something computationally interesting: being a clever interactive app is not enough. Some of the projects students wanted to undertake would have been great in a course on web and mobile apps, but they were not good contexts for exploring TDD for the first time.
I will be on sabbatical in the Fall, which means I'll be stepping away from this and all my other regular courses for a semester. It will be a good chance to catch my breath, and I won't have to carve out a week over the summer to rebuild the course.
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