Visa resultat

Course Evaluation: Frontiers of programming language technology 2007/2008, TDA261 / DIT760

Teaching and course administration

1. Opinions about the course plan

- I really like the setup with seminars and articles. Having the workload spread over a year and running at quarter speed makes this course refreshingly different from many other, rather hectic, courses.»
- The freedom and basically exploring your subject in favor of others have been great. The quality does vary a lot, but all and all, it is great fun!»
- I loved the presentation rounds. Good topics: Start of with something that everyone knows, go on to research papers. Finally we rounded off with a project and presented it. I liked it, this way the course had a good mix of both theory and practice alongside with a lot of discussions.»
- I like the structure of this course. However, I think that having two/three guest lectures per period would be a nice "break" from the student presentations. I would prefer guest lectures that are about an hour long (or shorter) and touching one or two key ideas (something the speaker thinks is cool -- that is usually interesting for everyone). I also think that riddles, similar to the one in Haskell at the beginning of the course, would be a fun element and something that could spawn a discussion.»
- I think it was great that the course was based on presentations. It was fun holding them as well as listening to the peer presentations.»
- it was OK»
- Good structure. More active participants are better, e.g. opponent for each presentation»
- Interesting guest presentations, good guest lecture»

2. How well did the course administration, web page, communication etc work?

Very badly»		0		0%
Rather badly»		1		10%
Rather well»		7		70%
Very well»		2		20%

Genomsnitt: 3.1

- the coursepage at GU did not contain the latest information. Booking in lp3 was done on a swiss site with no access restrictions, otherwise it had to be done manually by our teacher.» (Rather badly)
- The lack of a central point for information was a bit tricky, but it only took a few seconds of searching through the mail archive to get the info. Having a course mailing list was good choice.» (Rather well)
- I would want to see how the grading is performed at an early stage. When we received our grades it also stated the weight of the different parts of the course, this could have been presented earlier in the course. The best would be to have it first lecture. Web page wasn"t used that much, no problem with this though. When the web was used it was ok. Mailing list worked very well in my opinion.» (Rather well)
- Would be nicer to have the information centralized on the home page instead of always searching the email inbox for relevant information» (Rather well)
- A small group of people, and one mailing list, that worked just nicely. It was great to get these digest about upcoming presentation in the field of CS.» (Very well)
- We had good contact over email through the course, probably helped by the small size of the group.» (Very well)

3. Opinions about guest lectures

- Good. The thing I liked the most about it was that I really got to see what the "higher-ups" (teachers, lecturers, professors) were up to.»
- Koen is always great.»
- Hard to say, mostly informative, sometimes difficult to relate to. But interesting, the people. They all cary with them, experience and great ideas, and that you can always learn from.»
- Sorry to say I did not attend all of them. But anyway I think it was to few that was mainly for us. Most guest lectures were for others, other courses etc. I would have wanted guest lectures that was specifically [suited] for us, of course others could attend them also.»
- Too few. But those that were given were good and interesting. »
- Very interesting! More focused on market than research, which helped balance the course contents.»
- useful»
- Good»
- Very interesting»

Study climate

4. Opinions about the project

- I had some trouble finding an idea for the project that really interested me, being that I need something practical to really get going. When I had found that idea the rest was just plain fun.»
- The project was probably the best part, it was a great time for trying out something new, and exploring some cool programming stuff and getting away with it. I must have spent more than 60 hours on it, in total. But I really wanted to explore more, so I did sink a lot of hours into my project. »
- We had quite a lot to do with our project. I spent between 5-10 hours a week on average. This was a lot when I had other stuff to do as well. I think that it would have been better if we could have started earlier (as Dave said), in study period 3.»
- I"d like the project to run during the entire summer semester and have presentations at the same time. I spent approx. 30 h on the project.»
- It was difficult choosing the topic, but once we had an interesting one it was great fun. Looking back I only wish I had spent more time with it.»
- it gave me a good experience 30hrs»
- The project is good for the course. The number of hours is about 80»
- No idea about the hours, it"s really hard to estimate. Maybe it would be nice to have some intermediate meeting(s) with the teacher to discuss the progress »

5. How was the course workload?

1 (Too low)»		0		0%
2»		1		10%
3»		8		80%
4»		1		10%
5 (Too high)»		0		0%

Genomsnitt: 3

- Up and down.» (2)
- Any period of "overly" hard work were always the result of my poor planning.» (3)
- Not to much work. It was on par with how inspiring the course was.» (3)
- Great to have it during a full year, it was very nice to have a low workload with the presentations. I still got out *a lot* from it. It was a heavier workload with the project, a bit to much.» (3)
- I think it was a good workload over the year and we had enough time between presentations to prepare (and still read two courses on the side). In total though, I think I have put more hours in than usual in a 7.5 pts course.» (3)
- Low in the first three periods, very high at the end» (3)
- You put in effort when you had a presentation, other than that, you could sit back and relax mostly. I probably should have spent more time looking into what other were doing. Get started right away no matter what and you do away with last minute crunching.» (4)

Summarizing questions

6. What is your general impression of the course?

Poor»		0		0%
Fair»		0		0%
Adequate»		1		10%
Good»		6		60%
Excellent»		3		30%

Genomsnitt: 4.2

- The teacher was rather unenthusiastic about stuff and his typical comment was that functional programmers have been doing this all the time, leaving the feeloing that new or exiting things cannot exist.» (Adequate)
- I should have put more interest in other peoples" articles...» (Good)
- In general a good and fun course. » (Good)
- Well, it"s really about new technology, and programming and that stuff gotten me all hooked. I want more already!» (Excellent)
- I have learned a lot and had fun during the course and sincerely recommend others to take this course.» (Excellent)
- I have learned lots doing the presentations and I think that looking at programming languages and programming techniques from a research angle will really help in working with code in the future.» (Excellent)

7. Additional comments