Group dynamics can easily complicate projects that would otherwise be very successful. If one person doesn’t complete their work on time, turns in poor work, or just decides not to do anything the entire product can suffer. While these are i ssues that students must learn about, they can easily over complicated what could have been a very successful project.

Learning how to create a program that must be maintainable, extensible, and has to work on a variety of platforms teaches students vital skills that they will need in the job market. As the paper said, however, they really must be l earned first hand. No lecture can tell you what you’ll learn from trying it yourself. The problems of this project were complicated when too much was attempted at once. Complex ideas were mixed with poor group dynamics and instruction; the result was frus trated students who most likely viewed the project as a failure and would not want to try it again.

It seems that the team organization needed to be stronger. The teams needed more contact with the professors and should have been given "red flags" when needed. Allowing them to stray so far off course that they couldn’t reco ver may have taught them the importance of design, but college is a learning experience. If they could come up with a perfect design they would have already have been offered high paying jobs. Perhaps the design check system could have been implemented so that when groups started to make fatal errors they could have been told to rethink their designs. It seems pointless to let groups go off and fail in an environment where failure isn’t necessary. Being told to rethink their designs when there was a major flaw would not have impeded the learning process, but rather it would have allowed the groups to be more successful.

My feeling over all is that a project along these lines would be a great experience for upper level CS students. Once they have mastered programming, through assignments that emphasize the concepts taught in class, they would be ready to apply what they know to this situation. As for people just starting in CS, it seems pointless to give them a project that they are suppose to learn how to do while a student. If students could already design and write a large-scale program, th ey’d most likely already be rich. The programs that emphasized the concepts taught were essential to understanding cs015, without the programs the course wouldn’t have been very useful. It seems that this type of project could be a valuable learning exper ience, but certainly not at the introductory level.

MBA

Right on matt. Red Flags should have been raised early and often. All that occurred was the turning off of cs to all these students which was obviously not the goal.

I'm not sure I agree that not correcting the students' design was a a bad thing. I do agree that it made the experience much more difficult on the students, but I think it was instructive in that it taught them how to recover from a poor design or implementation. When you are programming in the "real world" there is no TA who can look over your design, and tell you if that's the right way to do it or not. Because nobody may know what the "right" design is. So, learning to patch mistakes when you can, or just redeisgn things completely if need be will teach the students how to deal with situations like that, as well as staying strong in their memories. Most of the lessons I remember the best are those which I learned from banging my head against a keyboard for hours at a time.