This academic year Imogen Dunne (a final year student here at Cardiff University) is doing her final year project looking at evaluating student attitudes in my “Computing for Mathematics” course.

The idea is to use questionnaires, focus groups and interviews to evaluate (longitudinally) mathematics students’ attitudes towards:

  • Learning to code;
  • Learning some early mathematics;
  • Learning in a flipped class environment.

This has started off well, and last week Imogen kicked off a meeting with me by giving me homework. Something along the lines of:

I’d like to see the attitudes of everyone involved from every point of view. Could you perhaps write a diary/log at certain points during the year, describing how you feel things are going?

I was delighted with this idea and thought that I might as well blog these reflections, so here it goes:

A good first week.

The first thing I will say is I think this first week went really well. Students turned up to their lab sessions having almost universally carried out all the required work which was awesome. There was one major change with last year shifting some of the content from each week to the next. This had the effect of making the first week a bit lighter which I think has been a good thing.

Some labs could have been a bit ‘noisier’.

I want labs sessions to be noisy spaces with students talking to each other and figuring things out. This happened in most of the lab sessions I got to see but there was one or two where it felt more like a high school class from when I was still in high school: students looking at me as if I was a teacher evaluating whatever they were saying. I’m using 2nd year students as tutors this year (which I’m super excited about: more about that later) and perhaps I need to do a better job explaining exactly what it is that I want the labs to be. I think this has now been addressed.

The best flipped class meeting I’ve ever had.

I strive for a student centred learning environment. This isn’t always easy to obtain but the first class meeting went extremely well. I came in to the meeting expecting us to talk about the index method on strings (which finds the location of the first occurrence of a substring in a string) as this was the main piece of feedback I had from the labs as to the difficulties of the students. We started talking about it that but then the students really took over and wanted to know how to calculate the location of all the subtrings. This was a really awesome session as we went in to a particular thing in much more detail than we would have otherwise. Most importantly students would never have been able to have that conversation with me if they knew nothing about strings and the index function…

Not leaving anyone behind.

When teaching in a classic lecture based setting it’s extremely difficult to gain an understanding of how your students are doing. This flipped environment is all about finding out how students are doing, I am constantly getting feedback as to what students are having difficulty with. I have to make sure that students understand that that is what the labs are for, I’m constantly saying this but will continue to do so.

Further more there are some students who are having difficulties with the content, this is completely expected but the great thing about teaching using this approach is that I’ve already been able to identify them and will be meeting with them during my office hours to help (I’m always happy to help students who want to work).

Big thanks to the tutors.

Finally, this week of class would not have gone so smoothly if it weren’t for the great tutors who have helped in the labs. These include some of my colleagues who have gratefully given up their time, Jason Young who has done an awesome job organising the undergraduate tutors and most importantly the undergraduate tutors themselves. They all did a great job and I hope will also continue to learn and enjoy writing code.

This has been written down in a slight rush before my next set of labs but hopefully will be useful to Imogen (and indeed perhaps my students).