Part 1: Screencast
I have created a screencast to motivate the use of Python dictionaries. It considers an application involving annual rainfall data.
Part 2: Story about demotivation
A class that I attended was divided up into groups of individuals. Each group was assigned an exercise, and all individuals were asked to work on it together. Once the exercise was complete, everyone in the group received the same grade. One of the members of the group I was in did a comparitively small amount of work and did not seem interested in the exercise, essentially leaving it to the rest of us to do almost all the work while they got the same amount of credit. This was quite demotivating for the remaining members of the group and left us at a disadvantage over other groups (in which all of the members were communicating and participating equally). Despite this, we each put in the extra effort to compensate and completed the exercise to a high standard, but it was not a good group work experience.
One possible approach to dealing with this could be to use a ‘peer feedback’ form after the exercise to document who did what and perhaps distribute marks more fairly amongst the members of the group.