[Year 12 SofDev] Term 1 Study Design Reflection

Wed Mar 23 23:40:52 AEDT 2016

Hi Laurie,

I’m a massive fan of Python, because it’s a great “first language”, it’s used in tertiary institutions, it’s cross-platform and it’s free. It also gives me an opportunity to talk to students about GNU Licensing.

With Tkinter, I’m going to be honest: TKinter is painful, fiddly, and time-consuming.  That being said, I deliberately choose to use Tkinter, even though there are other third-party packages that are much nicer to use. I want students to experience creating a UI without all the nice tools so that if or when they do decide to use one of the third party packages, they know why they’re making that decision (rather than having it made for them). For the same reason, I use IDLE as the IDE in class rather than a more powerful one such as PyCharm (which is what I use outside of class).  I’ll be introducing some third party packages to my students throughout the year (such as PIL) and have already introduced some others (such as pygame).

Selina Dennis

Strathmore Secondary College

From: sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Laurie Savage
Sent: Wednesday, 23 March 2016 6:22 PM
To: Year 12 Software Development Teachers' Mailing List <sofdev at edulists.com.au>
Subject: Re: [Year 12 SofDev] Term 1 Study Design Reflection

That sounds pretty good. How are you finding tKinter? We played with Python in year 11 but because we are a BYOD school I made the decision to move to PHP.

Sent from my iPhone

On 23 Mar 2016, at 5:42 PM, Selina Dennis <selina at dennis.net.au <mailto:selina at dennis.net.au> > wrote:

Hi everyone,

Just as we (joyfully) head into the Easter break, I thought I'd share with all of you some of the SAT project topics my students have selected, as well as a little bit of my own reflection on the Study Design changes.

Some background: I have 21 students in SoftDev this year: 11 x Year 11s and 10 x Year 12s - 3 females in total. The language we use is Python, version 2.7, with Tkinter for GUI-creation.

Of the 21 students, 19 have found clients that are not related to them (2 have family-run business clients). The vast majority of clients are small businesses that are part of the local community. The variety is really pleasing, including car repairs and parts companies, the local gym, a psychologist’s practice, a nutritionist's company, an accounting firm, a phamarcy and a local bookshop. 

While most students are planning business-related applications, some students have been able to find really interesting projects. Two students have clients who specialise in robotics, and will be working on (different) simulation and maze-traversal programs. One student is meeting the need of a classical musician and will be creating a modular metronome app that can be programmed to automatically change timing and tempo for specific musical pieces. Another is working on a backwards recipe app, where you can search for healthy recipes that you can make with what you have in the fridge. Interestingly, the majority of their design ideas focus on creating solutions to meet a client "need" rather than a client "opportunity".

Right now, students are at the stage of determining the data they need to collect (Observation Number 3) and we've been having some fun with mock-interviews and role-plays to help generate design ideas as well as help determine the questions they'll need to ask their clients to help them in their mission to create the SRS next term.  

>From the perspective of a teacher who has taught Software Development for multiple Study Designs, I can say that the switch to a SAT for this iteration of the Study Design was quite daunting. I was worried my students wouldn't be able to find "real projects" and "real clients" and that I'd end up with a lot of contrived programs that wouldn't ever be used. I'm so glad that I've been proven wrong!  Of course, not all students will be able to write programs to fulfil every element of what they've put into their initial outline/design brief, but really that's something for them to decide as part of determining the scope in the SRS. It's really hard for them to know what's "in scope" and "out of scope" in relation to their own abilities, though, as they're all just beginning to get comfortable with programming - no students have prior experience in Python, and only one student this year has prior coding experience. What I've noticed, though, is that students are far more excited about the subject than students I've had in the past, and far more engaged with learning the fundamentals of programming as well as the theory behind it. That's not to say my past students weren't excited, it's just a very different buzz to the room from what I've experienced before; the motivation has increased ten-fold.

Also from my "teacher hat" perspective: it's definitely more work, but I find I'm enjoying the different learning and teaching environment so the extra work’s not onerous. It's challenging and I've had to re-think the way I deliver content, but this has so far been quite refreshing. I'm still worried about SAT rubrics and meeting requirements and timing, but I'm certainly feeling more comfortable about the SAT as a whole than I did in January.

If anyone out there needs ideas for students who are struggling to lock down their project, please feel free to send me an email off-list. I'm happy to go into more detail about some of the design briefs that students have submitted. If you're a Python-based class, I'm also more than happy to share resources.

Thanks and happy holidays,

Selina Dennis

Strathmore Secondary College

_______________________________________________
http://www.edulists.com.au - FAQ, Subscribe, Unsubscribe
IT Software Development Mailing List kindly supported by
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au - Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vce/studies/infotech/softwaredevel3-4.html 
http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association Inc
http://www.swinburne.edu.au/ict/schools - Swinburne University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/sofdev/attachments/20160323/31ed6fa4/attachment.html 