Influencing T&L in Others

In the Teaching Strategies section, I described some techniques that I use when I conduct my lessons. In this section, I talk about some things I did to influence my fellow lecturers to try some innovative Teaching & Learning (T&L) techniques in the classroom.

The Who Knows Game

Fundamentals for IT Professionals (FP) is a Year 1 Semester 1 module that is taught by the mentors for each class. Since the tutors are mentors, this module is unique in that if we have 12 classes, then we have 12 different tutors. The objectives of the module include basic IT skills, professionalism, industry awareness, career preparation and team bonding. Consequently, the lessons taught are usually more open-ended and less structured, allowing the tutors flexibility for discussions and on-the-fly activities.

Over several semesters, I led students to develop the Who Knows game, which is a quiz show system based on the board game Wits & Wagers Party. How the game works is briefly explained in the Student Development section. For the past two years, we have also used the Who Knows game in the classroom for the module Fundamentals for IT Professionals (FP). The idea is that whenever there is a spare 20-30 minutes, the students can play this game.

There are several benefits to using Who Knows in this classroom setting:

• Students form teams to compete against each other. This promotes bonding through both teamwork and healthy competition.

  • The questions asked can be informative. For example, one question is "According to the 2015 Global Cybersecurity Status Report, what percentage of global organizations claim they are prepared to handle a sophisticated cyberattack?" Since the students need to come up with their best guess, it gets them thinking about the impact of cybercrime and the need for cybersecurity. This is especially effective when the tutor engages the students in a discussion afterwards. (What do you think is the answer? Spoiler below*)

• Although the game is simple, there is some strategy involved. Even if you do not know the answer, if you think another team does know the answer (because there is someone on the team who is an expert on the topic), you can always assign chips to their answer.

• The game is fun.

It took a few rounds of development before I was confident enough to volunteer the use of the system in the classroom. The system must be stable enough so that it doesn't crash all the time, and easy enough to use so that any of the 12 mentors (who have varying levels of technical skill) can host and facilitate a game session. Thankfully, despite some minor hiccups along the way, the game was very well-received by tutors and students alike.

My aim now is to refine the system to the point where I can offer it to other schools in NP.

*Answer: 38%. That's not much, is it?

Card Tricks in Problem Solving & Computing

Problem Solving & Computing (PSC) is a Year 1 Semester 1 module that teaches problem solving and logical thinking. One of the topics covered is Scientific Method, which is a fancy name for "observe, guess, test, then rinse and repeat". For this topic, I developed a lesson that involved performing a card trick.

The effect of the trick is as follows. I will randomly choose a student to be the mind reader, and then explain the trick to him in under a minute. Next, I will shuffle a deck of cards and lay out 9 of them in a 3x3 grid. The mind reader will face a wall, and I will get another student to point to one of the cards on the grid. Once this is done, the mind reader will proceed to read my mind: I will point to cards one by one saying "Is this the card?" If it is not the card chosen, the mind reader will say "No," but when I point to the correct card, he will say "Yes." How did he do it?

The other students are required to figure out how the trick works. They can ask us to repeat the trick as many times as they like. They can also ask us to modify the trick, e.g., "Can you point to the cards using this pencil instead of using your finger?" If a proposed modification will spoil the trick, I will say so. Using observation and by devising tests to verify or disprove their hypotheses, students should eventually figure out how the trick works. If a student is confident that they have figured it out, they do not reveal the trick. Instead, the become the next mind reader.

This lesson has gone down like gangbusters every time I've tried it. There are some students who get frustrated easily and want to find out the answer, while others systematically narrow down the possibilities until the arrive at the correct conclusion. And as more and more students figure it out, the others feel that much more challenged to do so as well. 

When I suggested this to the PSC teaching team, there was a bit of hesitation (not everyone is an amateur magician), but everyone reported that the lesson was a success once they tried it. This has opened them up to the possibility of using gimmicks like card tricks and puzzles to demonstrate concepts, which is more memorable (and fun) than simply giving them points on a slide.

How does the trick work? Sorry, I'm not going to tell you. That would spoil the fun. :)