www.ukc.ac.uk

Project Work in the Computing Curriculum

Sally Fincher

15th Annual NACCQ conference

Hamilton, New Zealand

3-5 July 2002

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EPCoS

Effective Projectwork in Computer Science (EPCoS)

• UK funded project (250k UKP)• 3 years (1997-2000)• 10 institutions• Effective Project Work in Computer Science: Principles

and Pragmatics, Springer-Verlag 2001

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Why projects?

• Learn something we can’t teach – but we want them to know

• Process • extended period of time, pts, possible methodology prescribed

• Product• often integrative of many aspects of previous curriculum

(“capstone”), written and oral communication skills. What is a report, anyway?

• Industrial practice• real projects, real clients, authentic experience, “authentic”

assessment, motivation

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Three features of project work

• Immersion• Situation• Location

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Immersion

• Projects are free from “normal” curricular timetabling & contact constraints (no lectures, self-directed)

• Students are free to do what they will with their time & material (and often spend far too much time doing so)

• Immersion can be seen in individual projects just as much as team/group projects.

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Immersion (i)

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Immersion (ii)

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Immersion (iii)

“My research library was in a shipping container … rented out for self-storage. I got the steel 8-by-8-by-40 foot space for $250 a month and spent all of $1000 fixing it up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch, and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-in-progress—all the notes, tapes, 5x8 cards, photos, negatives, magazine articles, 450 books and other research oddments laid out by chapters or filed carefully”

Stewart Brand How Buildings Learn, 1994

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Immersion (iv)

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Educational Examples

• Individual “Research-type” projects – from final-year undergraduate to PhD

• Design-and-build projects (typically in groups and of a semester or more duration)

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Three features of project work

• Immersion• Situation• Location

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Situation

• Students have to learn differently when doing project work

• If “situated learning” (Lave & Wenger) is an effective way to learn, can we use this in a more formal educational setting?

• The (frequent) interdisciplinary nature of project work combats the artificiality of the regular educational setting. Curricula divisions often have to be abandoned

• Project work is always contextualised

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Educational example: Aalborg

• Traditionally, higher education has been focussed on rule-based disciplines with independent identities in their own contexts

• Problem-oriented education, however, is based on working with unsolved, relevant and current problems from society/real life, e.g. the engineers' professional activity in an environment where solutions to real problems are sought.

• By analysing the problems in depth the students learn and use the disciplines and theories which are considered to be necessary to solve the problems posed, i.e. the problem defines the subjects and not the reverse.

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Problem-oriented project work

The practical problem can be a symptom that something is wrong with our theories and assumptions, and thus the practical problem produces a theoretical problem as to why there is a practical problem

http://www.auc.dk/fak-tekn/aalborg/engelsk/problem.html

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Other educational examples

• PJ300• Genesis at University of Sheffield

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Three features of project work

• Immersion• Situation• Location

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Location

• Classroom extension (catch-as-catch-can – may have features of immersion, may not)

• Maximal colocation (also called radical colocation – “project rooms”, “war rooms”)

• Distributed teams

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Radical colocation

“One site collected productivity measures on the six teams that we observed, as they do with all their software engineering teams. The measures allowed a comparison of these groups with the company norm, which showed the company already well above (better than) the national average. The results were remarkable: they produced double the function points per unit of staff time compared to the corporate average. They cut the total time to market (per function point) by two thirds, with none of the groups, again, even near the corporate average”

Gary Olson & Judith Olson Distance MattersHCI 2000 vol 15 pp 139-178

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Why does this work?

• could move from one sub-group to another• “overhearing” gave awareness• 42 flip charts over 6 weeks

• common referent (by gesture or glance)• maintains critical information• place for examining interactions and planning for new events• record of chronology of ideas or associatively meaningful

clusters

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Educational example: Roskilde

• Pedagogy was a crucial part of the experiment: lectures, fixed syllabuses, examinations and strict admission criteria were swept away.

• There was to be consistent implementation of project pedagogy at Roskilde University; students were to select topics that interested them and to carry out the work in groups.

• A project would be continuously assessed, examinations would not be necessary

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Roskilde “houses”

The project groups were organised in "houses", administrative and physical units that contained about 60 students, 5-6 teachers and a secretary during the first years. Working together, the teachers and students of the house decided on the themes for the project work. The intention was that the teachers' research, which was to deal with the same subjects as the students' project work, should take place in cooperation with the students.

http://www.ruc.dk/ruc_en/about/RU-history/

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Other examples

• Monash “studio-based”• Very short-term “projects” – one day, one week• “students need to be in the lab and part of the activity

there”Prof Ian Witten, NACCQ 2002

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But is it “authentic”?

• What we expect of project work• What we expect/assume of industrial practices• Distributed teams - potentially globally distributed

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Educational example: Runestone

• Different specialities• Different countries (and therefore different time zones)• Different cultures

http://www.docs.uu.se/docs/runestone/

Have to deal with:• Technological challenges• “Common ground”• Context & trust

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Culture

“Mangers start with sweet talk – the top of the hamburger bun. Then the criticism is slipped in – the meat. Finally, some encouraging words – the bottom bun. With the Germans, all one gets is the meat. With the Japanese, all one gets is the buns; one has to smell the meat”

E.S. Browning, Wall Street Journal 3 May 1994 Side by side: Computer chip project brings rivals together, but the cultures

clash

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Educational example

“Brace yourself for problems. Do your work in time (an golden oldie, that one). Yes, when an American says I can do all this, it means in Swedish : I will try my best (but no success guarantied)”

Mary Last, reporting student comment from the Runestone project, 1st CSERGI workshop, 1998

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Back to more basic things …

• Lots of ways to integrate project work. Immersion, Situation and Location are useful ways to think about what’s going on, but not very useful when designing instances of project work in educational settings.

•Assessment•Supervision•Allocation•Team/group projects•Reflection•Motivation

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How to find things out: how to use things

• In EPCoS we developed a projectwork “map”• Great for us• Pretty useless for anyone else

• Bundles• Problem Statement• This bundle is …• The way it works is …• It works better if … (It doesn’t work unless …)• Solution Statement

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Red Card/Yellow Card (aka “La Coupe du Monde 1998”)

Red card / yellow card (Give them a management tool)

Students and staff alike are reluctant to reward group members who do not contribute. (Although some groups are perfectly happy to “carry” a hitch-hiker). In either case, it is impossible for staff to know precisely how much work each team member did: only the students involved know this.

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Bundle body

• This bundle gives students some control over the behaviour of members of their project group and allows their non-performance to be factored into assessment.

• The way it works is that students are allowed to issue others in their project group with yellow, and in extremis, red cards. A yellow card is “shown” to a student who is deficient in effort or attitude or in other ways not making a full contribution to the group and is then lodged with the project supervisor. Being “shown a yellow card” results in a known penalty being applied to the student (for example a fixed number of marks lost), though a yellow card may be cancelled by increased effort, or at a boundary between phases of the project, or after a set time. A student who attracts the maximum number of yellow cards can be “shown a red card”, which excludes the student from the rest of the project and sets the mark awarded to zero. There is no recovery from a red card.

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Bundle conditionals

• It works better if staff set the parameters of control (the penalty, the number of yellow cards that can be carried)

• It doesn’t work if the system leads to the frivolous use of penalties. It doesn’t work unless day-to-day management of the resource/role allocation is in the hands of the group themselves.

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Solution statement – generalising the particular

• So: find a mechanism which devolves some control over the performance of group members to the groups themselves.

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More of the same …

http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/national/EPCOS