Hi Kai,
While I fully understand where your suggestion is coming from, I think
there are many potential students who are sufficiently self-taught to just
entirely skip a level-1 course. Those people would be quite turned off by
being required to take a course too basic for their skill-set.
I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I would definitely push back
against requiring that intermediate level people take our beginner level
course. In addition to being inconvenient for them, having advanced
students in a beginner course is often more disruptive to the whole room
than having a few beginner people falling behind in an advanced course.
I know we've tried a few things. Questionairres ("do you know what a loop
is"), entrance exams ("what will this code produce"), and simple
self-assessment based on a clear decription of the course. They all have
weaknesses, of course.
Katy
On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Hsi-Kai (Kai) Yang <[email protected]> wrote:
> >Greg wrote: I don't know how big a problem this is, but several
> conversations in the past two years make me believe it's big enough that we
> need to design for it.
>
>
> I assume that “intermediate” python classes have indeed been advertised as
> “intermediate.” However, the issue seems that we don’t want to discourage
> people who may have thought the “intermediate” course is too difficult to
> them. At the same time we don’t want to encourage people who are not ready
> for “intermediate” level. I think using a “certificate” system could be a
> solution. At the end of each course, we can issue a “certificate” to those
> who pass a certain threshold. To attend level-2 course, a “certificate”
> from level-1 course, either on-site or on-line, is a pre-requisite. Then
> both students and instructors can have a more objective method to make
> judgment.
>
>
> If a formal “certificate” method has already been adopted by SWC, please
> disregard my idea above.
>
>
> Thanks.
>
> -kai
>
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Daniel Chen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> If it is actually a intermediate only workshop. can we give them an
>> assignment to do?
>> They're not novices, so a little more should be expected from them.
>>
>> One that comes to mind is the snap crackle pop hw.
>> It goes along the lines of:
>> "write a program that prints the numbers from 0 to 99 inclusive, for each
>> multiple of 3 print 'snap'
>> each multiple of 7 'crackle', and multiple of 11 'pop'"
>> mention that if they cannot solve this in 20? minutes , they should opt
>> to attend a beginner workshop
>>
>> let it be on their own merit in terms of doing and 'correctness'.
>>
>> This would avoid having that student who has never seems a list or loop
>> from attending
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Greg Wilson <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2014-10-30 2:55 PM, Naupaka Zimmerman wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'd love to hear if any other people have advice for improving the
>>>> pre-course surveys to discriminate (make everyone write a fizz-buzz in
>>>> their language of choice? bringing a printout of their favorite geeky
>>>> meme?) between experience levels or more broadly about how folks have
>>>> effectively/successfully engaged groups with heterogeneous experience
>>>> levels.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm strongly in favor of finding out more about our learners before our
>>> workshops and/or making sure that people attend the right ones, but there's
>>> a trap we need to avoid. Our educational system trains people to believe
>>> that every test counts. Even if we tell them the pre-assessment isn't a
>>> test, some will perceive it that way, and if they can't get the right
>>> answers, they won't sign up for the workshop. Ironically, these are often
>>> exactly the people we most want to help. I don't know how big a problem
>>> this is (I don't even know what metric I'd use), but several conversations
>>> in the past two years make me believe it's big enough that we need to
>>> design for it.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Greg
>>>
>>> --
>>> Greg Wilson
>>> Software Carpentry | http://www.software-carpentry.org/
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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