| 1 | Course name | Functional Programming with F# |
| 2 | Course code | DVA229 |
| 3 | Occasion (academic year & period) | 2015/16, period 4 |
| 4 | Date of document establishment | 2016-08-19 |
| 5 | Responsible teacher | Björn Lisper |
| 5 | Examiner | Björn Lisper |
| 6 | Other teachers and assistants | Jean Malm, Jonas Skoog |
| 7 | Speed, day / evening | Half speed, day |
| 8 | Education programs involved | Primarily DVP, but it can also be elected by other students who have the prerequisites. |
| 9 | Number of registered students | 38 |
| 10 | Number of students following the course (but maybe not achieved much) | Estimated 29 (# of students who have any result at all, or attempted the written exam) |
| 11 | Number of passed students approximately one week after course ended | 16 (passed exam, lab, project) |
| 12 | Your opinion about the turnout | Better than last year, but not great. Maybe acceptable. However this year the result on the written exam was much better than previous years (79% passed, 23 out of 29). The bottleneck seems to be the project (16 passed). |
13. Describe shortly the planning of the course, and if you used any special pedagogical method used in course (all-over or single parts)
There are 16 lectures (covering theory as well as showing examples), four laborations, and one small project (estimated effective time one week/student) where the students are supposed to work in their own time. To give time to work with the project, the lectures and laborations are concentrated to the first six weeks of the teaching period in order to give free time for the project, and for preparations for the written exam, towards the end of the teaching period.
Pedagogically, I am a conservative old professor who believes in good lectures where important concepts are explained in a clear and pedagogical manner. The laborations are there to give hands-on experience, which is essential too. I also believe in own work with some freedom: thus, the project. Finally I believe that some individual examination, like a written exam, is indispensable for the quality control.
14. Did the students have the right prerequisites to this course?
I think that it has improved. Clearly it was a good thing to add the discrete math course to the prerequisites, I believe that the improvement in the result on the written exam to at least some degree can be attributed to this. However, despite this new prerequisite some students still seem to have a somewhat weak background in math, which then hurts their understanding of more abstract concepts.
15. The students' concluding opinions (course, classes, labs, project, examination etc.)
Some of this can be read out from the course evaluation. It was only answered by 7 students, so the statistical significance is low, but it is the feedback that we have. The students are really quite positive. With some single exception, all the free text comments are very positive. As for the grades, for some topics there are some 3's but there are no scores lower than that.
A problem (not unique for this course) is that the course evaluation probably was answered only by students who were interested in the topic, and thus will tend to give high marks and positive comments. There is probably a big body of more indifferent students out there who did not fill in the evaluation. Therefore it is hard to draw any firm conclusions from the results of the course evaluation.
16. Your opinion
I don't have much to say as regards the course evaluation. It's nice to read the positive comments, but as I have indicated above the results of the course evaluation have to be interpreted witha grain of salt. My own impression, however, is that the course has worked quite well this time.
17. Other comments
It is always fun to give this course.
18. Measures stated on previous action plan
19. Which of them are executed (and how)?
Labs 2 and 4 have indeed been adjusted. Also the order of lectures relative to Lab 3 was checked, and adjusted.
20. What has worked out well according to the students?
Most of the course, if the course evaluation is to be believed.
21. What has worked out well according to you?
I also think that most of the course has worked out well.
22. What has turned out be imperfect according to the students?
Not much. Some student thinks that the pace was too slow, and some student remarked that the home page for the course could be easier to bavigate.
23. What has not worked out well according to you?
I think that the part that deals with reactive functional programming (Lecture 13, Lab 4) needs some more work. It's a corner of the F# language where I'm not a specialist myself, so I would need to spend some time to refine my own understanding of the concepts before I can convey that understanding to the students.
24. Action plan until next course occasion