How to Use the In-Class Activities |
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Overview |
One way for students to learn course material and practice design skills
is for them to do in-class activities in small teams assisted by the
instructor. I have used this technique successfully for many years in teaching
software engineering design.
The template I use for in-class activities is based on the results of the NSF
Process-Oriented Guided-Inquire Learning (POGIL)
project. This project is an effort to improve the teaching
of college-level chemistry courses by having students work in teams to analyze
and solve problems, following a rather strict process facilitated by the
instructor. The template used as a model for the activity write-ups below is
presented and described in a paper by David Hanson called
Designing Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Activities. |
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Teams |
The in-class activities below are intended for teams of
three to five students. Teams of only two students lack sufficient breadth
of ideas to encourage good discussion, and teams larger than five take too
long to reach consensus and may leave some students out of the discussion
and decision-making process. Dysfunctional teams should be changed as soon
as possible; teams should probably be rearranged every few weeks in any case
to maintain student interest and to keep students with strong personalities
from becoming too dominant. Once the instructor gets to know the students,
it may be a good idea to form teams whose members have a range of talents so
that the weaker students can learn from the stronger ones. |
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Class Time |
Each activity requires at least a 50 minute class period.
The earlier activities don't cover as much ground because it usually takes
students a while to become accustomed to the activities and to their teams.
Some of the activities are quite open-ended and can be easily be extended
across two class periods or used as projects that are completed as homework.
It is also not necessary to finish every activity—much learning occurs
simply by working on the problems rather than by completing them. Students
often become frustrated when their team is unable to finish an activity in
class. The instructor can explain that the point is to learn and practice,
not to produce a deliverable. |
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Student Preparation |
One behavior that exacerbates the problem of running out of
time is failure of team members to read the resource material before class.
Students understand after only one or two activities that this is a very bad
practice, and peer pressure usually results in very high preparation rates.
I encourage good preparation by posting the activity write-up on the class
web-page at least two days before the activity, and reminding students of
the activity and the resource materials the class period preceding the
activity. Scheduling activities on the same days (for example, on
Wednesdays) also helps students remember to prepare. |
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Grading |
Student deliverables may be graded, but the time pressures
mentioned above and the vicissitudes of working on a team have convinced me
that students should be graded only on participation in in-class activities.
Although no homework assignments appear in the activity write-ups below, I
generally assign homework to go with each in-class activity that is graded
individually. |
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Frequency |
In principle, a course might be taught entirely using
in-class activities, but this makes it difficult to cover the amount of
material that must be included in a college-level course. Consequently, I
generally have one in-class activity every week or two, for a total of
between 7 and 12 activities during the semester. Besides the fact that
in-class activities are a good teaching tool, using them this way helps vary
the course so that it is not a monotonous series of lectures. My students
generally like to have them almost every week, so I tend to use them often. |
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Order |
The activities are completely independent of one another, so an instructor
can use as many or as few as desired, and can use them in any order. The one
exception to this rule is the Activity Introduction, which should be done first. |
Available Activities |
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Connection |
The activities below are keyed to one or more sections of Introduction to
Software Engineering Design, abbreviated ISED in the write-ups. When
more than one section of the book is covered in the activity, only the first
section is used in the numbering scheme. Thus, for example, Activity 4-1 is
based on ISED Chapter 4 sections 1 through 3. Most of the activities are
about design techniques or design notations and only cover one section of the
book. |
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Format |
All activity write-ups are PDF
files. Instructors are free to extract text from these activities and modify
it as they wish for educational purposes, provided adequate references are
provided. |
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Activities |
*Contributed by Ralph Grove, James Madison University |
Copyright © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc.