Starting week 6

Well, time flies when you're busy...  I haven't written here for a little over two weeks, and there has been more good and bad in that time - but mostly good, I think. I was frustrated last time with students not doing the pre-lab reading before coming into the lab, and a pretty substantial portion of the class took my admonishments to heart. I've graded the 4th lab now, and there's a substantial improvement: of the 80 points that come from lab activities (20 are from a post-lab quiz), fifteen students - about half the class - earned 70 or more points.  That's great! Unfortunately, there are a few students (around 7) that clearly were not understanding the basic concepts and either didn't turn in anything or turned in something so incomplete that it earned 10 or fewer points. I've pointed out resources for these students (posted solutions and walkthroughs, tutors, office hours, etc.), but those suggestions haven't been very effective. For my students that might read this, you need to take the initiative for your own success - don't give up!

Overall class averages aren't stellar due to the difficulties with earlier labs, but of the 31 students only 8 are currently failing. While I don't want any students to fail, that failure rate is pretty typical for introductory computer science classes - maybe it's even a little better/lower than freshman science and math classes in general. I still take it as a personal challenge to bring at least some of those students up from a failing grade to the point where they have a better grasp of the material and pass the class - I know that can be done!

This week we start talking about algorithms, which I think is a lot of fun. We'll see if the students find this as fascinating as I do - hopefully at least some of my enthusiasm about studying algorithms will rub off. And then from this point on, we'll start looking at a lot of higher level and fascinating things in computer science: concurrency, distributed computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, security, and more. I'm personally looking forward to talking about big issues, and spending less time on low-level details of BYOB. Let's look at the cool stuff!