I've seen Hadley's rubrics for his assignments. They are really excellent!
Mark
hadley wickham wrote:
I spent a lot of time focussing on code as communication to make
electronic interaction as easy as possible. Personally, I think this
is very important as the majority of my programming work is in
collaboration with others spread around the world, who I might see in
person at most once a year. I agree with Mark that encouraging
cooperation within class makes a big difference. There will usually
be a few students who catch on really quickly and can help the others
- a good reason for group projects.
For most homeworks, I printed out their submitted code and marked it
like you'd mark an essay, with marks for the equivalent of punctuation
and sentence structure. Little things like indentation make a big
difference to readability. It took a few weeks, but the quality of
their code improved considerably (so did mine!)
Hadley
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Mark Daniel Ward<m...@purdue.edu> wrote:
Dear Graham,
Actually, I love to communicate with the students by email, but I find it
a nightmare when they email me any code! Sometimes a 1-minute verbal
explanation will take several paragraphs to clarify by email.
I try to be available almost all of the time in my office, so that they
can drop by with occasional questions, even outside of office hours. I also
use a once-per-week lab session to answer questions, and I've noticed that
the students talk to each other during such labs..... and they frequently
answer each other's questions, which is a blessing.
Mark
Graham Smith wrote:
Hadley /Mark
Mark Daniel Ward wrote:
I'll follow-up on Hadley's comment by noting that I always post the
complete
R transcript of our class session, so that the students can download it
and
use it. I also add lots and lots of comments to the file (after class is
over), so that they can remember what we did in class. They seem to like
this feature of my class.
hadley wickham wrote:
This matches my experience in a course which I taught both Excel and
R. Most students preferred R because it was much harder to follow
what I was doing in the GUI - where exactly was I clicking, was it a
right or left click, etc. With R you see everything I type and it's
very easier to reproduce. It's also much faster and easier to produce
a page of commented R code that allows students to reproduce all the
important steps, compared to recording a screencast to show the steps
in Excel.
I'm glad to see my experience isn't unique.
I find the ability to email me a bit of code that isn't working a
fanatastic feature for me. It has always been a nightmare trying to
diagnose via email what some one is doing wrong with Minitab/Excel.
Graham
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