ADD?

Lectures are Ineffective Many conferences today are moving towards much shorter lectures: 15, 20, and 30 minutes. I think this dramatically increases value to the attendee (while making things significantly harder for the presenters and vastly harder for the organizers). Phillip Greenspun, in a post on improving undergraduate CS quality that holds for professional training as well, concludes: Lecturing has been found to be extremely ineffective by all researchers. The FAA limits lectures to 20 minutes or so in U.S. flight schools. Lab and project work are where students learn the most. The school that adopted lab/projects as the core of their approach quickly zoomed to the first position among American undergrad schools of engineering (www.olin.edu). Engineers learn by doing progressively larger projects, not by doing what they’re told in one-week homework assignments or doing small pieces of a big project Everything that is part of a bachelor’s in CS can be taught as part of a project that has all phases of the engineering cycle, e.g., teach physics and calculus by assigning students to build a flight simulator It makes a lot of sense to separate teaching/coaching from grading and, in the Internet age, it is trivial to do so. Define the standard, but let others decide whether or not your students have met the standard. A student who graduates with a portfolio of 10 systems, each of which he or she understands completely and can show off the documentation as well as the function (on the Web or on the student’s laptop), is a student who will get a software development job.