End of the Year - Engineering

June 8, 2011   

Reflecting on the engineering and stats courses that I taught this year, I'd say the engineering course went ok. There is a lot of stuff to cover in the course and several weeks of snow and the holidays got in the way to make everything a little difficult. It acually came down the the students quite a lot. Those who put in the work at home got on fine and those who didn't put the work in or didn't attend quite so much found it a struggle.

I set the students homework exercises but if I get a chance to teach it again I will start these exercises in week one so they get a proper grounding in the basics as these are very important for the rest of the course. Some topics are harder than others and I now have a better idea of those difficult topics and will be able to change the timings to take longer over these.

The course is split into two outcomes and I delayed the first assessment because the start of the second outcome used the skills tested in the first assessment, so by delaying the students got more practice with these skills.

Next time I will try as much as possible to use contextualised material for the engineers so that it isn't quite as mathematical. I got the best response from the students when the material was contextualised - so I need to alter as many of the examples as possible.