Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

Tonight I gave the last lecture of the third run of my class, Mobile Software Development.

The final recording is uploaded and the independent survey is done, as is the survey review with the course staff. We have our list of things to revisit for next time.

My TA said...1/

"People liked it! No surprise."

Which is kind of her, but a year ago, we had NO idea if people would like this.

I wanted a class that capitalized on students' position relative to the mobile stack to teach them skills that they would need in a practitioner or research role. 2/

That required teaching...risk analysis, automated testing, version control, IDE key bindings, ethical considerations, data privacy, feedback techniques, and the gravity of our jobs.

Ah—and at least two programming languages and two frameworks. 3/

I wanted the students to do lots of group work, but I knew how much students resent group projects (and as the "good kid" often saddled with the group's work in school, I understood).

I wanted students to learn to explain their ideas to an audience—like, a large one. 4/

Then, shortly before spring quarter began, it became clear that if this class was to do those things, it would have to do them remotely during a pandemic, a civil rights reckoning, and, if we got lucky, a political upheaval.

And when that happened, the course needed to also 5/

Take on the task of helping students cope with grief and stress while being fair to everyone,

and empower students to use their skills in service of the changes they wanted to see in their communities, their industry, their world. 6/

I don't know that we accomplished all this. But this is what we did accomplish:

1. By jove, they learn two languages and two stacks.
2. They talk about all those topics. They do activities for each one.
3. They work in groups every class, and they report that they like it. 7/

4. Their homework time spend is consistently below a cap that we set for ourselves to protect their mental health and maximize their learning
5. By the end they independently study, understand, and add features to a relatively complex app written by a "colleague" (me)

8/

6. They explain and demonstrate a technical concept on video to help others understand it
7. They work on a personal project or a community effort that is relevant to their interests
8. They make several friends in the class, usually

I still have a lot to learn as an instructor, and I'm grateful to have such committed and receptive colleagues, course staff, and students to help with that.

Many of the slam-dunk activities from this fall found their seeds in student feedback from the spring.

10/

And I'm not really a "here's all the cool stuff I did this year" kind of person even in the best of years.

2020 is, to put it generously, not the best of years.

But when I think back to January, an eon ago...

11/

I remember the (in-person! remember that?) meeting with @borjasotomayor where we ate Italian cookies and talked about what this course might be.

This thing is my pride and joy. Developing it gave me a sense of hope and fun in an otherwise unbearable year...

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...and I'm so proud of it,
and of my students,
and of my staff,
and of myself.

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