Teaching
Over-Performing Students
It would be unlikely for any first year programming class to
be solely composed of novices. We all
have students with a range of abilities, and this generates challenges as to
the best way in which to manage and teach the class. The students at the top need to be enthused
whilst we provide extra help to the students at the bottom, and try not to demotivate the ones in the middle. The TOPS project was designed to incorporate
sharing of current practice, peer observations across universities,
collaborative problem setting and intra-university programming competitions as
a means of extending the most able students in programming classes.
Competition
The inter-university
competition has two strands, both of which attract prizes for the winners. The first is for groups of students from each
institution to create a challenge for students from other institutions to
attempt in pairs. The second strand
involves pairs of students attempting the challenges created in the first
strand. Challenge marking is normalised
rather than absolute to allow for variation of difficulty levels between
challenges.
Acknowledgment
The project team wish to
thank the HEA-ICS for the
development fund grant which made this project possible.
Publications
Anyone
interested in the project may be interested in the following papers:
·
Carter J, Efford N, Jamieson
S, Jenkins T and White S The TOPS Project
– Teaching Our Over-Performing Students presented at the 8th
Annual Conference of the HE Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computer
Science,
·
White S, Carter J, Jamieson
S, Efford N & Jenkins T Tops - Collaboration and Competition to Stretch our Most Able
Programming Novices. Presented at the 37th Frontiers in education Conference,
·
Carter J, Efford N, Jamieson S, Jenkins T and White S Taxing our best students. ITALICS journal 7(1), June 2008