Life of a Software Engineering Student Surviving the First Hurdles of Athletic Software Engineering

16 Jan 2019

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Life of a Software Engineering Student: Surviving the First Hurdles of Athletic Software Engineering

So I’m writing about my software engineering course (ICS 314 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa), perhaps for those of you who are interested in a career related to computer science.

I don’t know what sort of classroom innovations you are experiencing (if you are), but in this course I’m experiencing something new to me: something my instructor(s) call athletic software engineering (or ASE, for short).
Let me throw in another acronym for the typical software engineering pedagogy (or TSE, for short).

TSE vs. ASE

If you’ve never sat in a typical college lecture (or at least, what I would consider typical), all we would do for the most part is come to class, sit, take notes on the lecture, and just leave after the lecture is over. There would be roughly one or two midterms and then a final in class. Everything else outside of class is just assigned readings (sometimes from an online source, not just textbooks if that helps a little), problem sets, and reading solutions to exams and problem sets.

But note that every professor seems to teach in a way that’s completely different in a way such that there really isn’t consensus, agreement, or syncronization between them all, which I personally did not expect. I thought the professors would all think and teach roughly the same way, but they differed and varied more than I had expected. Maybe it’s the opposite for you, you expected them to be more varied. I don’t know.

Maybe there are some people who find this work easy and/or entertaining, but for me the work (pertaining to the courses, at least) is typically dry and difficult.

Image credit: https://www.memecenter.com/fun/91630/huge-blackboard

So there’s the typical software engineering (pedagogy) for you, now how about this athletic software engineering?

ASE is different in that instead of spending class time taking notes on lectures, lectures are handled for the most part on a Morea website (Morea actually stands for modules, outcomes, readings, experiences, and… activities? I can’t seem to find what the A stands for, oh well). This leaves time in class for these workouts of the day, or WODs for short.

If you’re new to WODs, they are timed exercises where we are tasked to finish a certain programming feat before time runs out.
If it’s a solo practice WOD, you self time it. As far as programming languages are concerned, our course used Javascript.
That’s it. Simple, right?

You may have heard of the term ‘flipped classroom’, but in case you haven’t, it’s where the time in class is spent on doing timed problem sets (or some other real-time/timed activity) and lectures or lecture-like material are provided outside of class (usually online), which is opposite or ‘flipped’ from the typical classroom. Hence, the term ‘flipped classroom’.

My First Experiences with ASE and WODs

So far we’ve had two online practice WODs, one in-class practice group WOD (say that five times fast), and one real solo WOD.
They’re introductory and yet for the real WOD I barely made time with only 20 seconds of the 15 minutes left on the clock.

I’ll post my data for the WODs below.

Practice Solo WOD 1 (DNF is +8 minutes) Attempt 1: +8 minutes (DNF) Attempt 2: +8 minutes (DNF) Attempt 3: 3 minutes 8 seconds

Practice Solo WOD 2 (DNF is +12 minutes) Attempt 1: 11 minutes, 31 seconds

Practice Group WOD (groups of two, DNF is +15 minutes) My time (slightly later than my partner): ~10 minutes

Real Solo WOD (DNF is +15 minutes) My time: 14 minutes, 40 seconds

Conclusions and Final Thoughts on ASE vs. TSE

So what are my thoughts and opinions on WODs/ASE vs. TSE? Well, I think I will just have to get used to the WODs.
Yes, they’re hard, but the other alternative is the typical not-flipped lecture, which means I will have to learn the same material, same difficult concepts, but in a less lively fashion. If you’re thinking of pursuing a degree in computer science or computer engineering, then athletic software engineering might be something you have to look out for, or perhaps look forward to.