Cohort March 2023: Faculty of Science – Joss Ives, Anna Nikou, Jaden Majid, Ksenia Khoroshun, Allen Zhao, Aaron Kraft
Project background
Physics 210 is an introduction to computational physics course, a topic that centers around the translation of physical laws into computer code.
The challenge of diversity in coding experience
Although computer programming experience is not prerequisite, a start of course survey revealed that 25% of the learners had little-to-no coding experience, while 45% of them had at least some experience with Python, the programming language used in this course. The former group had an 8% lower course average than the latter. Feedback suggests those who struggle are primarily those with little-to-no coding experience, as highlighted by the Student Experience of Instruction (SEI) comment “The course moves at a quite fast pace, it makes adjustment and learning difficult, especially for people who are not very familiar with coding. The course progresses assuming that all the students are very familiar with python which is not the case for everyone.” Only 67% of the students replied favourably to the SEI statement “My academic background provided sufficient preparation for this course.” It is clear that this diversity in coding experience is providing unnecessary challenges for some students.
Project details
Redesigning the course as a series of modules to address course structure challenges
Currently, the course is split into a lesson-based first half and a project-based second half. The lessons focus primarily on developing coding skills with minimal grounding in Physics content, providing little disciplinary motivation for the tasks. Physics concepts are embedded much more heavily in the projects, but this results in minimal time being provided to learn challenging new physics concepts. Restructuring the course into four modules, with lessons leading to a module project for each, would provide critical physics motivation for the lessons and provide a longer period of time over which challenging new physics concepts could be learned.
Redesigning projects to emphasize communication and creative extensions
Projects would also be redesigned to emphasize creative project extensions, instead of the current emphasis on computational sophistication, allowing learners to take on technical coding challenges at a level most suitable to them. Project assessment will also shift focus to emphasize communication, visualization and interpretation of these extensions over computational sophistication. Additionally, robust project examples will be developed to provide better examples of how rubrics will be applied.
Redesigning resources to account for diversity in student coding experience
The course’s pre-readings will be shifted toward being more summary-based, but with embedded self-assessment to allow learners to know when they should engage with the more in-depth resources and learning materials that will be developed alongside these summary-based resources. We hope that these changes would provide a course that is engaging and equitable across the entire range of previous coding experience that we see with our incoming learners. By redesigning this course our partnership hopes to see it become more equitable across this wide range of previous coding experience—with respect to workload and opportunities for success in the course—while also being highly engaging to learners across this diversity of previous experience.