Another Guest Lecture at MIT

Given that the previous Guest Lecture at MIT that Sid and I had conducted went well with the students and teachers, ThoughtWorks Pune was invited to do another one at Maharashtra Institute of Technology (Pune) on 7 March 2009.

This time it was Dhaval Doshi (fellow-ThoughtWorker) and me as speakers.

Yet again, we did not prepare until the day before the talk. We asked for inputs from a few others in office, and got ideas like tackling Agile or Open Source Software. Although those topics have merit, we weren't sure if they'd click with students, and hence decided to stick with the teachers' preferred topic of OOP.

We thought we'd run the session as a facilitated discussion on OOP characteristics to start with, elicit a C++ feature list, and then get students to collaborate on coming up with some C++ code around a small problem, followed by a group exploration of how well they'd reflected theoretical OO concepts in code, finally rounding off the session with our stab at the problem highlighting how we'd have catered to OOP principles.

We ran this idea through our official Training dude, Sumeet Moghe, and he liked it too, his main concern being time.

So before leaving for the day, Dhaval and I set timeboxes around each of the phases of our session, feeling somewhat comfortable with what we arrived at.

The next day, however, as I left home, my mind starting thinking about how we could make the session more "fun" (this is one angle that had both Dhaval and me concerned). By the time I picked up Dhaval on the way to MIT, I asked him to make a big leap of faith: "Let's change our entire plan!" I said to him.

I quickly told him the 3 "role plays" I had in mind for the students. He caught on to my idea, and we started fleshing it out, turning some of the role plays into mini-contests to get even more excitement... and boy, I'm glad we did that 'cos the session turned out to be one wild experience for everyone!

We started the session trying to get the students to recall the concepts they had picked up during my previous visit. After an initial hesitation and more prodding (we actually said we'd leave if no one spoke up 'cos we'd think we're not providing value!), the students actually came up with a complete list of what we'd covered last time! Those kids are good!

After that, we quickly got to the "games": during the course of the next hour, we had students running about, standing on tables, fighting for chalk to write on the black board, and what not. There was a lot of laughing, joking, and overall cheer in the class. In about the last 15 mins, we finally stopped the games and brought the session back to the topic: OOP. Almost no one had guessed that the games were about applying OO concepts to solve real problems: it was a recognition of theoretical concepts/definitions coming alive in implementation.

This is a partial list of what we, as a group, finally recognized from the post-mortem of our role-playing experiences:

• effectiveness of OO approach over procedural
• abstraction
• encapsulation
• multitasking/threading
• polymorphism
• collaboration
• getting objects to do tasks is better than having them transfer their data around ("Tell, don't ask")
• coming up with list of classes from real-world objects
• drawbacks of assumptions
• benefit of not being lazy, ie, actively thinking of alternative solutions
• team spirit
• learning from past experience

The session was extremely well-received by students and teachers alike. Some feedback we received was that (1) the session was very entertaining, yet educative, (2) if we'd talked about or shown code, students would have dozed off, (3) such understanding of OO would help during the placements (at least when ThoughtWorks comes visiting! ), and so on. We ended up talking to a few students after the session and they sought advice on what to focus upon, what books to read, etc.

I'm also glad that MIT's teachers are so open-minded that they could appreciate how our unconventional style of delivering sessions actually gets through to students better.

I'm still wondering if I should mention here the role plays we did... I partly want to keep them a surprise in case we decide to do a similar session again... let's see if I change my mind.

Tags: technology:events, technology:thoughtworks, personal, general:education Last modified 02:53 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 by AmanKing. Accessed 273 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.