Course evaluation results

Overview

Of the twenty-some participants in the Computational Software Engineering course, nineteen filled out the course evaluation. Of these all but two reported that their course expectations were "met" or "nearly met". Given that the course was given for the first time, and that the timing of the course was such that it was difficult to coordinate teaching activities, I think we can be happy with this result.

But after the course expectations, there was a wide variance in the responses. While all but one agreed or strongly agreed the instructors displayed good knowledge of the subjects, five were "neutral" on whether they were well prepared, and one "strongly disagreed". Frankly, knowing my own lack of time to prepare, I find this ambivalence justified. And yet, five said they "strongly agreed" that the instructors were well-prepared. The teaching speed was "too fast" for a quarter, "too slow" for a quarter, and "just right" for the rest.

The quality of the course material was generally considered ("good") but the quality of the hands-on sessions was felt to be significantly lower (seven "fair", four "poor" and one "very poor"). It is clear that the hands-on sessions need to be redesigned for any reincarnation of the course.

A key theme of the course was that many participants felt the Software Engineering was not of central interest -- six reported that the course relevance to them was only "fair", two "poor" and one "very poor" -- and several mentioned that they specifically had wanted a two-week summer school concentrating only on parallel programming, in particular MPI:

Q13: What additional training should CSCS offer?

A 2 week course exclusively on MPI, and not on tools (cmake or math or shallow water equations).

Thus, while this summer school component itself got a relatively good mark, my conclusion is that this component should not be part of a summer school, but rather it should be a standalone course for those who are specifically interested in Software Engineering issues. Indeed, it is not planned as part of Summer School 2014.

While the course organization and logistics applies to the summer school as a whole and is not really a topic here, it is worth mentioning that the participants complained that the course schedule was distributed fair too late, and that the venue was uncomfortable (non-functioning air-conditioning).

Interesting comments

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Very good and enthusiastic lecturers. Possible improvements: - The last block of the day (1530-1700) I would always use for some hands-on session, because the end of the day is just not a time of peak concentration. The session on C++ could have been interactive if students were asked to study the manual that we went through before the course. This would not have taken too much time, and then we would definitely have gotten more out of it. Because just watching at some lines at code is not the same as actually trying to run them.

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The cmake exercise was a bit too fast / too much. Maybe could have been done a bit more step-by-step with discussion/explanation in between so that you keep understanding exactly what you are doing instead of just following what's in the exercise description.

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I would have liked to receive the course schedule (or at least some approximate schedule) much earlier. We only got it a few days before the start of the school now.

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Copy-pasting complicated code at least for me does not lead to much insight into how it w orks. Simpler examples, where you have to write short pieces of code yourself w ould have been more useful. (This applies in particular to the cmake tutorial.)

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I would have liked to create my own repository.

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The midday break is too short. A summer school in a southern region requires "siesta" time, at least three hours.

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Hands-on session were more like rewriting some commands rather than learning and understanding them. I think that some speakers were trying to pass too much knowledge for given time, which result in huge confusions and also make people even more worried and scared for using some features/commands etc (when You are trying to pass to much knowledge at once, the results will be exactly opposite).

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It would be good when at the beginning of each hands-on, the speaker sits in front of his computer and do the actions step by step and students repeat them on their computers. In the same time speakers explain w hat exactly the commands are doing. And then after one of two common exercises let students think on their own.

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About Cmake: Way too much material. Even though Cmake claim to be easier then make I am now more scared to use it. However the lecturer had huge knowledge but it would be much more suitable knowledge to people who has some experience with Cmake.

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I very much like the idea of tackling an actual problem and all the sub-problems that come w ith that. It might however be a good idea, to more clearly identify these sub-problems upfront and tackle them in a more structured way.

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I'm lacking of bgd in software engineering. courses are somewhat difficult.

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I would have liked to have the day-programme/schedule a few days earlier, to know that was expected (c++ know ledge instead of c, at what time do I have to be in Lugano, etc). But in principle I am very happy and satisfied! Thank you!

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