Flipped classroom model

[jack89roberts]

The plan is to trial a flipped classroom model for the next delivery, where students will read through the material before the in-person time, which will instead focus only on questions and exercises.

Proposal to achieve this:

• Create a cheat sheet/summary for each module
• Come up with a way for students to pose (and upvote) questions before the session (e.g. using slido or similar)
• Create a small number of longer exercises for each module (say 1-3)
• Teaching schedule? Keep to 4 hours per day or make it less? Perhaps 0.5-1 hour of questions, 2-3 hours of exercises (and solutions)?

[jack89roberts]

Current exercises:

Module 1

• Maze Model (solution)
• Maze Population (solution)

Module 2

• Occupancy dictionary (solution)
• Your own solution (to occupancy classes)

Module 3

• Saving and loading data (solution)
• The biggest Earthquake in the UK this Century (solution)

Module 4

• No explicit exercises but the whole module is quite interactive (like a follow-along do-it-yourself exercise)

Module 5

• Energy calculation
• Monte-Carlo (example rather than exercise)

Module 6

• No exercises

Module 7

• Bad Boids refactoring

Module 8

• No exercises

Module 9

• No exercises

Module 10

• No exercises

Self-Assessment Exercises

• An Adventure In Packaging
• Packaging Greengraph
• Refactoring trees
• Refactoring Bad Boids - old, should be replaced with module 7 version.

[jemrobinson]

Possible problem with Module 4 is that if one step doesn't work, you can't (easily) just skip it and do the next one.

[nbarlowATI]

@jack89roberts @jemrobinson is this flipped classroom model the plan for this year? Or do we think it's more likely that for this year we'll use more-or-less the same model as last year?

[jemrobinson]

This year will run the same as last year. I'm not totally sure whether flipped classroom is a good fit for us or not. The part that's easy to scale is the "going through the notebooks" part and the part that's hard to scale is the "answering individual participants' questions". I don't think flipped classroom would solve that.

[jack89roberts]

What me and Helen were trying to do (and got about halfway through) with this in mind was to make it so that all modules have exercises, and all those exercises are in a separate notebook at the end of the module. And those exercises can either be shorter ones linked back to specific sections in the module, or bigger ones that use what was learned across the module as a whole.

I think that's still a move in the right direction, even if we never end up doing flipped classroom.