Here’s my final reflective post for Imogen Dunne’s final year project (you can find the first here, the second here and the third here).

The main feeling I have as I reflect on this past term is how tired I am.

This term/semester/thing has been so amazingly busy. Before I go any further I need to thank my PhD student Jason Young. Jason has just started his PhD and has been acting as a full teaching assistant for me with this course. I have no idea how this course ran without having someone to help me last year and this leads me to my first point of reflection: students have engaged very well with the course.

I believe (hope is perhaps a less biased word) that the main reason this has been busy is because this has been an active learning experience for my students. This could be due to the flipped learning environment (I would like to think so) but also perhaps just having a really greatly engaged set of students.

Here is a list of things that I plan on changing for next year:

  • Another set of videos - I’m going to double the amount of videos I have. I think this is a natural thing to do as I’m more aware of the difficulties students have. This is all part of the reflective pedagogy that revolves around the concept of being able to react in a timely manner to feedback as to student difficulties (if I’m not doing this than I am no better than a book). The reflective approach ensures a dynamic reaction to difficulties which can happen on various scales:

    • Class meetings: based on difficulties during the week (micro level)
    • From year to year: based on major trends during the year (macro level)

  • More scaffolding on technical issues - I always underestimate the starting point of some students. I need to do a better job helping them with simple things like using a mouse, using internet browsers and also more tricky things like debugging LaTeX.

  • As discussed before: a much better scaffolding of student tutors (the undergrads).

On the whole though I am very pleased with how this year has gone. In particular I feel that a number of students have not only learnt to code but also understood the importance of learning to code in conjunction with learning mathematics. Here is a quote that I’m taking from one of the 3 page papers that students have had to hand in at the end of term (this particular one looking at the futurama theorem):

“It has to be said, when I first looked at Keeler’s proof, the whole thing did seem incredibly complicated. But after coding it and using it in ‘real life’, it is pretty straight forward.”

This is really nice to read as it’s something I say a lot: coding complicated mathematics will often help understand it.

It reminds me a bit about this nice lightning talk that one of the students gave last year:

Matt Lunn - Lightning Talk - Django Weekend Cardiff from AOTV on Vimeo.