Assessments in module order

This assessment verified that students obtained laptops with the appropriate hardware, had the appropriate operating system installed, and had successfully installed the appropriate version of Java.

Discussion:

• Almost all students complied with requirements. Those who didn’t had inappropriate hardware.

This assessment verified that students learned how to subscribe to the class newsgroup and how to post an introductory message about themselves.

Discussion:

• All students fulfilled the objectives.

This assessment verified that students implemented a professional portfolio that satisfied the guidelines in the Professional Portfolio Style Guide.

Discussion:

• Some portfolios failed checklist items (remove commenting mechanism, poor home page picture, navbar does not link directly to PDF resume, home page not informative)
• Some resumes were poor quality (comic sans font)

This assessment verified that students learned how to join the TechHui and LinkedIn professional networks and set up appropriate profiles.

Discussion:

• The students who did not appeared to be intending to drop the class.

This assessment verified that students could implement a trivial Java program using the Eclipse IDE and write up their experiences in an appropriate manner.

Discussion:

• All students were able to implement the (trivial) system.
• Two of the students wrote an excellent posting.
• Four of the students wrote postings with significant grammatical problems or without useful insight.

This in-class assessment verified that students could find basic violations of the Elements of Java Style in sample Java code when working in a team.

Discussion:

• The game does not preclude that some players might be “free-riders”, but most players appear to have increased their knowledge of EJS by playing.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Java Coding practice WODs.

Discussion:

• Please report all of the times for all of your attempts, and discuss what changed between attempts. This provides a reader with insight into how exactly you learn from doing the same programming problem more than once.

• Take time to reflect upon your experience. That is an important part of the learning experience. These blog postings are ultimately for you, not for me. Make them valuable. Don’t finish the WODs at 8:55pm on Tuesday leaving you only 5 minutes to throw together a posting. That eliminates a learning opportunity.

CharFrequency is the first “real” WOD of the semester. Students were asked to individually implement a Java program which differs only slightly from the last Java Practice WOD.

Discussion:

• Half the class completed the WOD successfully, which is a reasonable starting point. My hope is that the percentage of DNFs will decrease as the semester continues and everyone gets more experienced.

Students worked in groups in-class to design a web page on the history of surfing.

Discussion:

• Only one group did not complete the task.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the UI Basics practice WODs.

Discussion:

• It appears that if you don’t repeat WODs until you get AV, you run a high risk of DNF’ing on the in-class WOD.

• Some of you are publishing rather sloppy, meandering descriptions of your experience. Starting next week, I will deduct points for a posting that does not have minimally acceptable structure and content, including:

  • You describe each practice WOD in its own section.
  • You summarize the goal of each practice WOD.
  • You clearly specify the number of attempts (and the Rx/Av/Sd/DNF value) for each practice WOD.
  • You articulate interesting insight into the experience and insights you gained from the practice WODs.

BrowserHistory4 is a slight variant of the BrowserHistory3 practice WOD.

Discussion:

• Only half the class finished this individual WOD successfully. In contrast to last week, in which the DNFers actually did not turn anything in, this week all but two students turned in their code prior to the cut-off time. This means that in seven cases, students submitted solutions that upon review were not correct.

• In some of these cases, the difference between the submission and the reference screenshot shown in the WOD was so obvious that I wonder if those students simply “gave up” once it got close to the DNF time. In other cases, it could be that the students simply overlooked a problem with their approach before turning it in.

Students worked in groups in-class to design a single web page using a “color blocked” style with Twitter Bootstrap.

Discussion:

• Every group completed the task.
• The aesthetics of the pages produced by groups varied considerably.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the UI Frameworks practice WODs.

Discussion:

• I still feel like many of you are not creating postings that will impress future employers when they read them, because I think some of you are still writing for me, not the world.
• Please do not repost my long bullet list of requirements. Instead, summarize the goal of the WOD in a paragraph, perhaps augmented with a screenshot.
• As long as you make a single attempt at each WOD, and follow these guidelines, you can get full credit for this assignment. That said, I think it is crazy to not repeat the practice WOD until you get to at least Av performance. From reading your entries, it is clear that many of you learn substantially more on the second and even third attempts. Don’t deny yourselves the learning opportunity!

Students worked in groups in-class to create a Play application implementing a responsive version of a Castle High web page.

Discussion:

• Three groups did not complete this task in the 60 minutes provided.
• The Play framework has a significant learning curve and many students did not appear to have spent much time on it yet.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Web Application Frameworks practice WODs.

Discussion:

• There are only a few of you who are actually succeeding in “writing for the world”. Many of your posts, quite frankly, are pretty boring to read. Those of you who are doing it right are creating little “stories” with a beginning (setting the stage, what your background regarding the material is, etc.), a middle (the actual WOD experiences), and an end (conclusions and insights).
• It feels weird to me to take off points because a blog post is “boring”, but maybe I should start doing it just to get your creative juices flowing. If you came across your own postings online, would you want to work with yourself? Do you think, “Wow, this person is creative, intelligent, and probably fun to hang out with!”

MultiPageKamanu is a variant of the PlayResponsiveKamanu practice WOD.

Discussion:

• For the first time in an individual WOD, the number of DNFs fell substantially below 50%. In addition, more students obtained Rx time on this WOD than ever before. These appear to be encouraging trends.

Students worked in groups in-class to use Google Hangouts and GitHub to collaboratively create a release of one of their Surferpedia systems.

Discussion:

• All groups accomplished this task.
• Many students required this in-class time to learn to use these tools.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Cloud-based Hosting practice WODs.

Discussion:

• Everyone who actually submitted did well.
• More attempts to provide “personality” in the postings. Keep up the good work!

This was the first paired WOD of the semester: students added a new page to a partner’s Surferpedia website. To make matters more complicated, they could not speak to their partner; all interactions had to be through Google Hangout; and they shared their code through GitHub repositories. The goal of this WOD is to test both website manipulation skills as well as software engineering collaboration skills.

Discussion:

• Again, relatively few DNFs on this WOD.

Students worked in groups in-class using Google Hangouts and GitHub to collaboratively augment one of their Digits applications with additional functionality.

Discussion:

• All groups accomplished this task.
• Many students had not completed all the practice WODs prior to this session.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the dynamic web applications practice WODs.

Discussion:

• All essays were at least satisfactory.

Students updated a dynamic web application written in Play to incorporate “Delete” functionality. The WOD required them to update the model, view, and controller sections of the web app. While the base application code needs to be touched in several places to implement Delete, if you know what you are doing it is possible to implement this quite quickly.

Discussion:

• Performance on this WOD was interesting in that there were no Sd times: either the students finished in less than 20 minutes or they didn’t finish at all. Also, all of the finishers had a correctly functioning application. Out of the 14 students, there were only 2 DNFs, which is a strong showing from the class.

Students worked in groups in-class to collaboratively augment one of their Digits applications with additional functionality.

Discussion:

• All groups accomplished this task.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the dynamic web applications part II practice WODs.

Discussion:

• All essays were at least satisfactory.

This was a solo WOD in which the students had to design a scala template to abstract away some raw html code in their view. The WOD required them to touch just two files in their Digits application.

Discussion:

• This WOD showed more variability than I expected; I had assumed this would be very easy for the class. The finish time went from 5 minutes for the best finisher to a DNF at 21 minutes. The percentage DNF continues to fall, although five students have now dropped the class, which may account for the low percentage of DNF.

Students worked in groups in-class to extend the Surferpedia application with a listing of updates and deploy the results to CloudBees

Discussion:

• All groups were able to implement the enhancement.
• Two groups failed to deploy to CloudBees.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Cloud-based Deployment practice WODs.

Discussion:

• This week I took points off if the blog post was little more than “I did the assignment in this amount of time.” Those kind of postings are simply “homework assignment turn-ins”, not actual technical writings that would be of interest to others.
• I know you might have the feeling that the “real work” is doing the assignment, and the blog post is just a silly thing added on to the end, but in the long run, your blog posts are going to count as much or more toward your reputation as your ability to add a checkbox into a form. Some of you are actually taking the time to think through the implications of what you’re doing in class, while others do not appear to be taking the effort.

Students worked individually to extend the Surferpedia application to indicate if a surfer uses regular or goofy foot style and deploy the results to CloudBees. About 8 files and 100 LOC changed.

Discussion:

• Most students reported this to be an “easy” WOD.

This assessment shows what percentage of students in this class signed up, paid for, and attended Startup Weekend.

Discussion:

• 50% of the students elected to do the Startup Weekend, which I view as an extremely positive outcome. Event organizers said this was the most ICS students who ever participated in a Startup Weekend.
• One team consisting primarily of students in this class won the “Most likely to succeed” award.

Students worked in groups in-class to add a registration page for new users to one of their Digits applications.

Discussion:

• Most groups seemed quite comfortable with this task.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Authorization and Authentication practice WODs.

Discussion:

• All students did acceptably well on this essay.

This was a fairly complicated WOD that required the students to add authorization and authentication to their Surferpedia system. It required changes to around 14 files and about 300 added lines of code.

Discussion:

• This turned out to be a (relatively) hard WOD; four students DNF’d.

Students worked in groups in-class to collaboratively develop an ER diagram using LucidCharts for the TextBookMania application.

Discussion:

• All groups accomplished this task relatively easily.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Model Design practice WODs.

Discussion:

• Students appear to now be able to consistently create satisfactory technical essays on the topics presented in this course.

This was a “take-home” WOD in which students were on the honor system to do the WOD at home and report their results via email. The task was to create an ER diagram for the play-example-form application and upload it to a GitHub repo for display in the README page.

Discussion:

• While times were not instructor-verified, I feel confident they are accurate.

Students worked in groups in-class to add a MySQL backend to the play-example-login system and deploy it to the cloud.

Discussion:

• This WOD requires about an hour to implement for Rx time; thus the groups either finished or DNF’d with Rx time because classtime ran out after an hour. Ideally, groups would have had up to 90 minutes to complete this WOD.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Model Implementation practice WODs.

Discussion:

• Students continue to be able to consistently create satisfactory technical essays on the topics presented in this course.

Students worked in groups in-class to create a GitHub issue documenting a needed test for a Surferpedia system, implement and commit the test, and close the issue.

Discussion:

• All groups accomplished this task.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to write a high quality technical essay summarizing their experiences doing the Testing practice WODs.

Discussion:

• Some students, presumably due to end-of-semester pressures, did not submit or did an unsatisfactory job on this essay.

This assessment evaluated the ability of students to complete all seven aspects of the final exam successfully.

Discussion:

• Everyone did at least a satisfactory job.
• A third of the class did exceptionally well.