MSc Courseworks

I have now finished teaching the MSc module at Loughborough, so I thought it would be fitting to write about my impressions on the blog. As always teaching can be intimidating at first but in my case I felt very much at ease having taught the BSc class last semester. Rightly so, lets compare the BSc with my MSc experience:

MSc. vs. BSc.

• BSc. class was huge (150 students) compared to 16 students in my MSc class. The great thing is that I could build a more personal relationship with the individual students. You can actually remember their names and very soon you get a good idea how good every individual is.


• Since the group was much smaller I found that; the dynamics in the class were less formal (Students asked more questions and I encouraged them to). It was a small and enjoyable class to teach.


• In a way I hate to say this but the MSc students were certainly brighter and hence the material could be covered at the lightning speed of 2 weeks. When you have bright students it's a pleasure to teach. On the other hand I should say many of my BSc students were also pretty decent and I did have lecture time to cover XSS and all kinds of funky JavaScript, including some JQuery.


• Big negative with the MSc class. There's just too little time to cover everything to my unilateral ideal of great learning in 2 weeks that is alloted for a fat-module. Then again I can't fight the system and the class was supposed to teach strong foundations but it wasn't meant to make superstar programmers out of my students in 2 weeks, but of-course I would have loved that challenge!

The assessment for the MSc course consisted of a 40 minute in-class test on paper and an programming coursework (over a week). The coursework was to build a sudoku JavaScript board game skeleton that allows a player to load puzzles (81 long integers) and play on the 9x9 board with the basic 3 sudoku rules enforced. In addition the possible numbers for board elements had to be suggested.

A number of solutions were done very well to the specification and showed good understanding of my students. Here is an example coursework by Tomas Kavaliauskas.