Thank you. mirc and sohbet social network..

I believe we would have been able to learn just as much if not more from either simpler or fewer assignments. Either one would have helped because i feel if we had fewer assignments we could have been a little more elaborate in class on the projects we had to do. If we had simpler assignments then many students, at least students like me, would learn a lot more. I know when it come to projects 3-5 i would have a very hard time with the programs getting to work right and I would get so frustrated I just wouldn't care anymore and just turn in my project unfinished.

As far as the group projects go I don't think you should make it required that students need to work in groups, but if they did you could have it be choose your own groups, with a max amount of students per group of course, and have all of the students in that group hand in 1 project that they all worked on. If a person in the group doesn't pull their weight on one of the projects then a group probably wouldn't let them work with them again, so I think you wouldn't have to worry about too much academic dishonesty.

With the exams I don't think you should have us do the code part in lab because many students, like myself, take a long time to write programs. When I work on a program I normally take the wrong approach about 5 times before I finally figure out how to do it write, so when it comes to having an hour deadline im just figuring out how to write the program by the time the class is over, which led to me getting 0's on 2 of the in lab portions. I think you should post them online for a day and give students a 24 hour span to finish their code part of the exam.

Another thing I think you should work on as a professor is getting to class on time. We would lose about 10 minutes of class every day because you would show up 5 - 10 minutes late then take another 5 minutes to set up all of your stuff.

I also think that the in lab quizzes are kind of pointless. They are barely worth anything for our grade. I learned much more working with groups on the actual code parts, so i would have appreciated that time we spent on the quizzes to work on the code parts instead.

Edited by author 12-12-2008 11:34 AM
Thanks for your feedback so far. I'm writing here to let you know that I do indeed read these. Several of you have commented that programs 3-5 were much harder than 1 & 2. I'm taking that to heart, and will try to even out the difficulty level of the programs.

anonymous 4 (below) asks about my reasons for giving an in-lab portion of the exams. Over the years I've discovered that some students are really good at the in-class portion of tests, but are not so good at actually writing code (I would have counted myself among those "back in the day.") Other students are the opposite, where they are good at writing code, but not so good at the in-class tests. This is the reason that I've split the test into two separate parts.

Regarding the question on whether or not engineers will actually ever need to use this stuff - It depends on your job. Believe it or not, the main thing I was trying to teach you was how to do problem solving within the confines of the limited instructions of some particular language. Once you have mastered one programming language, you can fairly easily make the transition to macros in Excel, Matlab, or many other programming languages. If someday out there in the workplace you find you actually benefit from the programming experience in this course, I would very much like to hear about it. Likewise, 5-10 years from now if you *never* have used it, I'd also like to hear that.

Regarding the suggestion of being able to work in pairs - that is a very good idea, and I had fully intended to have you do that, in fact I was going to *require* it for program 4. The problem was that for whatever reason, this semester there were many cases of academic dishonesty where students turned in others' work as their own (~10% of the class!) So, when I got to that point in the semester I was concerned that many students working in a group would not do their part. I have not yet figured out a good way to allow students to work in groups, but guarantee that each student works hard. I heard from multiple students that it wasn't until the "pain" of program 4 that suddenly everything "clicked," and they were able to understand what was going on.

I appreciate your feedback, all of you. It helps keep me grounded in what the experience is of a student in my class. It is easy to lose perspective after many years of teaching, which is why I value your feedback.

I'm very interested in finding out if any of you have ideas on how to learn just as much, with less work. Do you feel you would have learned just as much, with fewer/simpler assignments?

first off, before you choose the TA's, i think you should sit them down and see if they are even qualified to be a TA. obviously you see if they are good programmers, but you should also look to see what kind of manners they have. i could barely understand what Shou was speaking half the time and Ilie just came off as a jerk and an ***hole. second, i remember in the beginning of the semester you said that every thing you do in this class you can provide specific reasoning. well, i want to know what your reasoning is for giving us in-lab portions of exams. i understand if you do this for 102 students, but we are NOT programmers. no offense to you, but i doubt you understand how engineers work today. if engineers need to program anything, they'll do it excel or matlab, not stuff as complicated as java or c++. my dad and uncle, chemical engineer and mechanical engineer respectively, have been doing their jobs for over 20 years and they never once had to program anything. third, why do you make your programs so much more complicated than any other CS professor? are you trying to prove something to them or what? i have friends who have taken 107 before and when i go asked them for help, they couldn't because their programs were never that extreme. if you're not willing to change the program difficulty, at the very least, allow us to work in groups or even in pairs, like you do in 102.

Program 3 or 3 and 4, same thing were a little to hard. it took a lot of time to somehow understand how to write those, and if not the code You guys provided i probably wouldnt be able to write them. But after writing the Yote in Java, doing the same thing in C+ was a piece of cake. It seemed that after answering the tons of questions we had, Prof. Reed didn't have enough time to finish the lecture. Maybe some rule of 5 questions should be applied, and the rest of the question would either had to wait till the next class, office hours or would be answer on a BB forum for general question by more knowledgable ( i dont know how to spell that word correctly) class mates

Prof reed,
I totally agree with the person below me ur prgrams for 3,4,5 are extremly hard for non CS majors like us. Its harddddd. I passed the class with a B but oh my god that class took all my time. Make programs easier and by the way ur personality is great u make us come to class and very interseted lectures. The lectures u do are helpful and never change ur personality the class will pass without even noticing the time which is a postive thing

Prof. Reed
The programs in this course are really hard beside the first two programs.
It would be helpful for students to do those programs if you do more of the simple programs in class showing them how to do those because many students don't have any idea how to start writing the programs. Also, since programs get lot harder after the first two, It would be lot easier for students if they are allowed to get some help from other students.
Thank you.

Fall '08 CS 107 students,

This is the space for you to make suggestions to us (Prof & TAs) about what we could do better. In particular I'm interested in knowing if there is some way that you could have learned just as much, though with less work.

Thanks for taking the time to help us continually improve this course!

- DFR