According to an old wisdom (and supported by quite a bit of research), one of the best knowledge acquisition methods is "Learning by Teaching". (Indeed we, the ICS 311 instructors, have learned a lot by preparing for this class, studied the textbook materials, constructed apps, produced screencasts, lecture notes, homeworks, and - last but not least - the in-class quizzes.) While taking a quiz tests whether you grasped some aspects of the study material, being able of make a good quiz requires in depth knowledge of the topics - and that's exactly what you should aspire to achieve in your studies.
The Flip-Flop methodology intends to put this old "Learning by Teaching" maxim into practice. Making tests and quizzes is an integral and established part of teaching - and to create a quiz you have to come up with several good questions and a correct and some incorrect answers for each of the question.
You, the ICS 311 Fall 2018 students, will use an authoring tool to not only to take quizzes, but to make them - synchronized with the 311 screencasts. But this tool goes beyond just entering questions and correct and incorrect answers: It allows you to enter feedback for each of the answers - typically a justification why the correct answer is correct and reasons why the incorrect answers are not. Moreover you are encouraged to enter a hint that that points in the right direction but doesn't reveal the right answer completely. We also support 'hint links' where you can past a link to a web page (or to a YouTube video, or...) with the most relevant resource related to your question. Obviously knowing how to scrounge the web to provide such links is a valuable skill.
The entire class will be subdivided into groups of (up to) 4 students and the composition of groups will change every week. Each screencast will be split into 4 portions and our framework will assign one of the portions to each student in this group. This way every student will be an author of a quiz based on a different piece of the screencast and will take the quizzes that her peers in the group constructed from the other three pieces. To simplify the author's work our app makes a quiz template and places it on the author's channel. Once you as the author finish editing your quiz, you simply click the "Ready" button to send the peers in your group an email with the link to your channel where they can now can start taking your new quiz.
At the end of each quiz you will be able to "improve" on all the components of the quiz you just took, e.g., you can change the question's wording, choose another answer as the correct one, improve the justification why an answer is correct or incorrect, modify the hint text, or paste in a hint link to a web page that explains the topics better. Or you can agree with the original content of each component or with a suggested "improvement" of a peer who took the quiz before you. We intend to implement an easy way to view all the suggested improvements and assess their quantity and quality so that we can incorporate it into the grading schema for Flip-Flop - stay tuned...
For the screencasts that are the subject of the class on Mondays, you will find the corresponding
template in your channel on the preceding Wednesday and you should finish authoring the quiz by
Friday noon time (11:55 am) so that the peers in your group have enough time take the quiz.
The deadline for taking a quiz is Monday noon time (11:55 am).
For the screencasts that are the subject of the class on Wednesday, you will find the corresponding
template in your channel on the preceding Friday and should finish authoring the quiz by
Monday noon time (11:55 am) so that the peers in your group have enough time take the quiz.
The deadline for taking a quiz is Wednesday noon time (11:55 am).
According to most AI experts, creativity will be the last vestige of human inteligence that will - if ever - be replaced by artificial inteligence. Note that two most important aspects of AI are algorithms and big data, so the topics our course are arguably an indispensable prerequisite for learning AI and your future career in IT. But maybe even more important that knowing how algorithms work are creative ideas in which areas they can be applied. Therefore, we have constructed an 'app' on Google Doc where you will be able to formulate one idea every day. In the One Idea Per Day folder you will find a document with your UH Id (email without the @hawaii.edu suffix). Add to your document a date 'every day' and underneath a title of your idea and paragraph (or more) describing succinctly this idea.
Note that while we encourage you to prefer ideas that relate to the course content (e.g. a novel app that needs an efficient algorithm to sort data), you can even describe some improvement in the course content or format, a better way UH may serve the students, an improvement to DaBus app, new manicure robot, new ways to educate, etc., etc. The ideas are interrated periodically within a spreadsheet where an ellipsis (abbreviated string) of every idea occupies a cell. (Therefore, you should give the idea a "title" on the first line.) When you hover on the cell you can see the entire idea in a popup dialog. And your peers can click on your email in the leftmost column to open your document, find the idea via its date and even add comments to it - please suggest improvements, paste a link to your own follow-up idea, brainstorm.
Note: Your ideas may be valuable and we cannot guarantee that no one will try use the idea for profit, for instance, file for a patent based on your idea. But since you typed in an 'invention' date for each of your ideas, you should have a good argument that it is you who came up with idea first... (And are likely to share the profits.)
While you should come up with an idea at least every working day, we encourage you to make it a daily habit - even on weekends - after all, your creativity should have no limits!