2013-01-18 Meeting of the Software Carpentry Study Group
Agenda:
- What we learned from stories
- Peer instruction and concept tests
Ariel had trouble understanding some stories
- Sequencing story depended on things that had come before
- But the one about regular expressions was easier to follow
One of the things that struck Greg was that the concept maps for the stories were broad
- Good to show tying things together
- Bad in that it makes it less likely that others will fully follow them
- Do we think this is useful in the context of a 2 day SWC bootcamp?
- Can/should we build towards an overarching “project”?
- Problem with overarching projects: difficult to shuffle things around around teachers schedules
- Students may get lost
- Having stories worked out in advance with a specific end point can make them more concise and useful. What is the point of this story?
Assignment:
- Come up with a couple of multiple choice questions
- Each introduces a new idea or tool
- e.g., having seen cut and head and tail, how do you accomplish task X
- 1 answer is right, others are plausibly wrong
- For each wrong answer write 1-2 sentences on what the student doesn’t understand if they choose that wrong answer
- Wrong answers have a diagnostic purpose-would tell the teacher what people don’t understand
- Very short
- Peer instruction — pose question, vote, discuss, see answer, discuss
- Post to blog under category 2.4 by Feb 1st
- Read and comment on everybody else’s questions before meeting week of Feb 4-8
- See “Challenges” in shell.html for some alpha-quality examples of questions (without explanations of the plausibly-wrong answers)