Ed Carryer - Stanford ME218a
Mel Chua
Stanford. (We'll plan a Berea stop on that roadtrip down the line; look
for this convo to pick up again 3-4 weeks from now).
While there, I happened to meet Ed Carryer, who teaches a Mechatronics
(graduate) course sequence there which my brother Jason took and raved
about in terms of pedagogical design. It has some minimalistic
front-loaded labs to review circuits and programming, then dives
straight into fairly complex (but *very* nicely scoped) team projects
for the remainder of the course. I'm particularly interested in how Ed
thought through the lab designs in terms of what needs to be
front-loaded and how.
Google around for Stanford ME218a (it's the 2nd course in a series of 3)
and see if you can find things -- I've asked Ed if there are other
course materials he'd be willing to share (Jason says the lectures and a
lot of the labs/notes/etc are online but I'm in the air right now and
can't search myself). I'm wondering if any of the material/environment
setup might be adaptable to an introductory, non-grad level course.
Jason tells me there's an undergrad version, but I'm not sure where to
find that stuff yet. I'll be back at Stanford at the start of May and
hope to observe the class and talk to Ed some more, which should be fun.
Just keeping y'all in the loop. Let's steal ideas! Yay! :D
--Mel
Jan
Thanks, Mel! It sounds really interesting. Thanks for the post. I found the site at http://design.stanford.edu/spdl/. Unfortunately, many of the materials after 1999 seems to be buried in CMS https://coursework.stanford.edu/portal/.The lecture links at http://design.stanford.edu/spdl/ are all broken...
Mel Chua
Thanks, Jan -- I've emailed Ed asking if we could somehow see his course
notes and such, so hopefully we'll all be able to see this soon.
As I look at the (paper) copy I have with me now (thanks, Jason!) I do
see one thing I like a *lot* about the lab designs -- they're extremely
well-scaffolded. They have multiple sections, one per experiment, all
centered around a common topic/theme -- not unusual -- but there's also
a section at the start of each lab instructing you to do the following:
1. Read through the entire lab worksheet
2. Before setting foot in the lab, you should prepare to use your lab
time efficiently by working *precisely* these parts of each section of
your lab; make this table, predict this number, what do you expect to
see here, how are you going to set it up?
3. Okay, go to the lab and get your data.
4. Now write stuff.
#2 is new to me -- I've not seen such explicit scaffolding for labs
before. I'll have to ask my brother if this is the case, but I predict
this does several things:
* makes lab time more efficient (as promised)
* gets students to understand what they're doing in the lab, so they
make deliberate measurements instead of randomly stabbing things into
the breadboard in a desperate hope that something will show up on a
scope screen
* gets students to actually read the lab document thoroughly beforehand
(I know every professor I've ever had tells me to do this, but honestly,
I usually give them no more than a cursory skim before launching into
the lab, because I often don't know the domain well enough to figure out
*how* to pre-think through the lab; without this sort of guidance on how
to look at it, the best I can do is blindly stabbing.)
Anyway, crossing fingers that we'll be able to see full materials Real
Soon Now.
--Mel
Matt Jadud
> 2. Before setting foot in the lab, you should prepare to use your lab time
>
> I'll have to ask my brother if this is the case, but I predict this does
> several things:
This is a common part of most every undergraduate Chemistry and/or
Physics experience. Having problems and/or "pre-lab" work to do is not
at all uncommon. By that, I guess I mean "if I experienced it in
multiple contexts as an undergraduate, I don't think it is uncommon."
This is also the essence of how we run active classrooms. When you get
rid of lecture, and try and move more "homework" type activity into
the classroom, you need the students to be investing time before class
in prepping. We do this with small quizzes, etc., so that they can
come and actively engage for 1, 2, or 3 hours, and not squander that
face-to-face time.
That said, I don't typically CS instructional materials that do a good
job of making this kind of thing explicit. It might also be the case
for engineering contexts... perhaps it is too easy, as experts, to
think "we'll just have them make things, and they'll learn." (And,
really, I have little idea what is in our heads as experts developing
instructional materials... but it probably isn't a clear picture of
where the learner is.)
A long, but fairly interesting post that probably touches on this
theme (or other themes we have, or will yet, discuss):
(via http://computinged.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/we-used-to-know-how-to-teach-cs-in-logo/)
Cheers,
Matt