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title Guidance for Instructors

Guidance for Instructors

Github Classroom and Github Organization

  • Each Github Classroom gets permissions from an "organization". Some guidance in creating the organization:
    • Only instructors and TAs should be members, for security.
    • Do not add students to the organization. If you do, they can potentially see other students' repos and may see things (like starter code) you don't want them to see.

Team Projects

The team projects are the most important learning experience in the course.

Suggestions based on past experience:

  • Have students start thinking of a project idea as soon as possible, no later than week 3.
  • Provide parameters for the project: team size (4), allowed and disallowed topics, characteristics of a good (and bad) project topic.
  • Have clear and explicit deliverables and be firm about due dates. Many students procrastinate until the due date is near.
  • Force teams to submit project ideas early, even if they don't have a team.
  • Try to get a lot of initial project ideas, so you can reject the poor ones and still have enough that everyone can join a team of 4 people.
  • Many of the initial proposals will be poor, incomplete, or the scope is too small or too large. You need to give rapid feedback and require rapid revisions, and allow time for 2-3 revisions.
  • Put a firm deadline for "acceptable" ideas. Any idea that doesn't meet your stndard should be rejected. The students involved are then forced to join another team.

Instructor's Role in Team Projects

You are the high-level operating executive. You need to ensure that everyone stays on-track, on-schedule, and shares the same goals. The TAs can help in giving students individual, detailed help improving project proposals, but only the instructor has the perspective and authority to make final decision on ideas.

Its just like in a company -- the president or COO needs to decide which product ideas are worth pursuing, facilitate discovery, and keep everyone on track.

Frequent Deliverables in Plain Sight

  • Frequent, specific deliverables (even if not submitted) keep everyone on track.
    Examples:

    • Initial project idea submitted using a template.
    • Project proposal, with a Revisions Table showing dates and feedback from TA/instructor. Deadline for initial submission, revisions, and final submission.
    • An "information hub" (Github wiki) created with required content, and a link to this added to the Projects sheet.
    • At least 10 User Stories written & reviewed, including stories from perspective of at least 3 different stakeholders. Avoid using the term "user" to describe participants. User Stories added to information hub.
    • Project Plan written according to template & approved by a TA (in Projects sheet)
    • Iteration 1 Plan added to info hub (wiki)

  • Provide templates, guidance, and an example as much as possible

  • Put everything in plain sight for others to see. This makes it clear to each time what they have to do and adds some peer pressure.

    • I use pages in a "Projects" Google Sheet as much as possible.
    • Some pages the students can edit themselves (til the deadline), others only the instructor and TAs can edit.