Using an interactive quiz as a teaching tool, the teaching team works with small groups of students to solve the quiz.
Goal: To promote creative thinking; to have students undergo the research process; to communicate concepts and scientific results interactively instead of lecturing.
Background:
The interactive quiz is based on information that the instructor gives to the students at the beginning of each class. Handouts and slides are projected during the activity (The details are here http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/classes/cs165/).
During the interactive quiz the students are provided a handout of the slides of the day which constitute the basis for the quiz. Each student then has a design for the problem of the day.
Procedure:
- Students break into groups of 2 - 4 students and they work on the problem for 30 - 40 minutes.
- In the meantime, the instructor and the TFs walk around the room spending 5 - 10 minutes with each group of students and leading them to the answer via a series of predefined questions. The details are described in the course website: http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/classes/cs165/
- During the activity students brainstorm together with the class staff to find a solution to the quiz.
- The staff's role is to ask the right questions to lead the students to the set of possible answers based on previous material.
- The students take notes, and design solutions on paper together with the staff.
- The process on average takes 30 - 40 minutes in each class.
- Once the process is over, the instructor reserves the last 5 minutes before the class time is over to summarize the main concepts, results, mistakes and the path taken by most student groups.
- To close, there is a discussion on the experience, mistakes and solutions.
Comments:
- The instructor advises teachers using this activity to carefully prepare the right questions/quizzes as well as questions to ask during interaction time that would lead them to the right solutions.
Submitted by Stratos Idreos, Computer Science