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Description
Mark Phythian's assessment task is a programming task in assembly language, ie the language at the level of the microprocessor. Students write a program to meet Mark's specification and it should achieve at least a modest level of complexity. The specific task is varied each year to reduce plagiarism and similar problems.
Learning goals and objectives
The learning goals are for students to develop the skills of how to program a microprocessor. There are thousands of different types of microprocessors, and teaching students about just one of these gives them the principles and basics of programming at this level. The idea is to develop lifelong learning skills – ie, students will later be able to apply the principles of this task to other types of microprocessor. The task is designed so that students need to analyse logically and synthesise a solution from a set of building blocks. It is a design course, so there is no set answer provided in the study materials.
Target audience
Students taking ELE 2303 (Embedded Systems Design). There are around 30-40 on-campus and 50-60 off-campus students – about half of these in Australia and half overseas.
Informing students
At this level students are only just beginning to learn to design. The assessment materials provide background information, tell students where to find information in study materials, outline a problem or scenario, and put this into an industrial context. It is written up as a specification in the same way as the students would see in industry. Mark is careful how he words the course materials and assignments in order to minimise ambiguity. The assessment itself is in seven parts, aligning with the sub-parts or sub-routines of the main program, so that students can see where to start, what the steps are, and how the parts fit together. Mark tries to select an application that students can directly relate to – for example, controlling a lift (elevator) or an engine management system, or robotic controls, or a data logger.
Feedback
Mark recently revised a numerical marking scheme, changing to a rubric marking scheme. This gives him the opportunity to provide more feedback in less time. He gives general feedback on a marking sheet (see below for link to rubric) and provides specific feedback regarding the fine details in the program itself. Mark is hoping to develop a student project that will help with marking. His idea is to develop a system that records comments on an audio recorder as marking takes place, compresses the audio files, associates these with the student name, and provides it as feedback to the student. This should reduce the amount of writing required.
Roles
Mark is the lecturer and course examiner. He has one marker to help him. The workload for students is open-ended because the nature of programming means that a student could spend a very long time perfecting a program. Mark has allocated 30 hours to this task but students tend to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete the task, so Mark always encourages them to familiarise themselves with the programming tools early on. Mark's workload is larger than he would like but his familiarity with the hardware and the tasks speeds up the processes involved in marking.
Moderation processes
Mark goes through the problem before marking begins, discusses the marking rubric with the marker, and produces a sample solution of parts of the documentation, especially the expected structure of the program. At the beginning of the marking process, the marker brings marked assignments in for Mark to look at. They have a general discussion and Mark looks over a sample from all levels and all the poor assignments.
Results
Mark is happy that his assessment achieves what he wants it to do. The new rubric is popular with students as they are receiving more feedback. Over the years Mark has tried different formats for this assignment, for example giving them less guidance to encourage independent study or having groups of students working together, but he feels the current arrangements work better with individual projects and guidance being more appropriate at this level.
Problems and advice for others
Mark didn't want to be too prescriptive for a design assignment, but finds that by guiding the students to divide the problem into logical parts, the students learn the methodology better and he can save marking time.
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