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Retrospective course

Here we have a Retrospective on the course as a whole. This retrospective was done at the end of day 5.

Please, no pointing fingers (I am sure Jon would want me to say that :-) )

What went well?

  • Pair programming +3
  • Lots of exercises +2
  • Windows XP background -1
  • Github workflow (CI) +2
  • Hand-on demos that can be used in the future +3
  • Provided an opportunity for more social programming, including working in a live github repository where other people are working +1
  • Frequent breaks +3
  • Time for questions and answers
  • teachers are enthusiastic and seem to know what they're talking about
  • Good level of social interaction +1
  • Well expereicned teachers +1
  • chatting during breaks +1
  • cats +4
  • providing references

What held us back?

  • Lars rushed through the last parts of his lectures
  • Too low tempo, especially in the lectures. +1
  • Some excercises could be explained better. We spent a lot of time just discussing what we were supposed to do. +1
  • Unclear desciption and explanation of exercises +5
  • (Still) too many lectures -- Zoom fatigue
  • Some parts of the pair programming seems not needed
  • Presentations
  • Balance between lectures and exercises.
  • Skipping over content throughout the course; it gets confusing
  • might be helfpul to do the git stuff all together
  • too often told to not point fingers :finger_gun:
  • less reading documents after Wed.
  • too manny cats -6
  • Different levels of preparation, everyone does not fulfill course prerequisites or preparations from last friday

What can we improve?

  • If exercises or examples are related with published papers
  • Personally, I felt that the course was held at too low level. I was expecting more details and technical discussion, especially in the algorithm and data structure sections and I was familiar with most of the course content. In the future I would suggest that you should make it more clear what level of material to expect. +1 (but in the opposite direction - found a lot was very technical)
  • More focus on a project to try out all the things taught in the course. Design -> Tests -> Implementation -> Iterations
  • If there is an opportunity giving small group project and make presentation at the final day
  • The course website should be keep maintaining
  • No need to attempt completeness, one week is not enough -- material on top of what is discussed in documentation on GitHub -- more exercises, less lectures
  • provide the correct/complete presentation PDFs on GitHub
  • The coures was 'top-heavy'. The beginning (in my opinion) should be more interactive and with more utilities, like git, being taught. After the first day, then you can bring in more and more theory.
  • I think when it is online, the course is limited in several certain ways. MAybe consider on-sote class?
  • it would be nice to survey attendees beforehand for their favourite languages and experience with specific parts of the course - e.g some are gitmasters, some have never used git before and found it confusing af - and tailor classes appropriately
  • Show more "good" github repos
  • 🐱🐱🐱 more cats 🐱🐱🐱 +2
  • additional animals +3
  • Additional materials
  • more dogs 🐕
  • more on design of larger program projects

  • More examples of how these things are practiced in an academic setting

  • if possible, work only on example project (no planets,no bacteria)