On Case Studies

Typically, I post at the end of the week after all the students have blogged. Today, I decided that I would post first.

This week is supposed to be the second rest week where the students get to take a break from the hectic first half a semester to prepare themselves for the Final Project. The students are also supposed to working on refining their proposal for the Final Project between last week and this week.

We tried to do something today by discussion two case studies that were developed from the Final Project reports from the last batch. Neither case studies are prescriptive. I didn't have a set of teaching points in mind. The goal of the case studies is to highlight two key issues that the they should play attention to for their Final Projects - one, user interface vs user interaction and two, the importance of team dynamics.

User interface and user interaction are not the same thing and as Kent rightfully highlighted, they both contribute to this amorphous quality known as user experience. I have to admit that I am not an expert at UI design. What I do know however is that a little bit of common sense (and planning) goes a long way. I was extremely pleased that Kent demonstrated at the end of his presentation how carefully the GetHelp! team had thought through all the different interactions for their application.

I was also pleased with the discussions we had about the case study. I didn't have to do much. I was merely listening to what the students had to say and putting the points down on the board. Among themselves, the students highlighted most of the key considerations for Facebook applications. It was heartening 'cos it demonstrated that many things are quite obvious if people will just take "think" about it a little harder.

Wei Man deserves special mention for realizing that there was a serious problem with GetHelp! in that it didn't provide a person who asked for help a good summary of the help that was offered. I am personally quite embarrassed because I didn't realize this even though I spent quite a lot of time trying to find bugs in Kent's app last year. Perhaps it was because I was trying too hard to find bugs instead of actually using the app like as it was intended.

I would also like to thank Vincent Woon for taking time to come back this evening to share his experiences with the class. It's a pity that we ran out of time for if not, we would have had a longer discussion.

Personally, I think some students still need to learn to speak up a little more. I cannot emphasize the importance of speaking up and making sure people sit up and pay attention to your existence more. But actually, I am not overly concerned or in a hurry to see results.

From my own personal, we hear our teachers tell us many things. More often than not, we hear, but we don't understand. This is not a matter of intellect or lack thereof. It's more a issue of experience, or rather lack thereof, that prevents young people from fully appreciating what they hear.

Hopefully what the case study session has achieved this evening is to plant some seeds of understanding in the minds of the students. :-)

Unlike my previous posts, this post is not meant to be a summary of the points we discussed this evening. That is the blogging homework for this week. :-) Hui Hui had an evening exam and unfortunately couldn't make it to class this evening. She is going to depend on what she reads from the blogs of her friends to figure out what she missed.

I am well-aware that most students conveniently "forgot" to blog about the Google talk. I actually didn't forget. I intentionally "forgot" to send a reminder 'cos people were really stressed that week grappling with their WPF assignment.

The goal in teaching is to facilitate learning and so I believe that some flexibility ought to be exercised when the situation demands of it. In this light, students will be pleased to know that they are not required to do a make-up post for the Google talk if they haven't already done it.

However, starting from the lesson had earlier this evening, the students have no excuse. :-)