Da Yang TAN* and Yoke Leng LOO
NUS College
Tan, D. Y., & Loo, Y. L. (2024). Reverse engineering pedagogy to bridge diverse learning backgrounds in classrooms [Poster presentation]. In Higher Education Conference in Singapore (HECS) 2024, 3 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecs/hecs2024-dytan-ylloo/
SUB-THEME
Others
KEYWORDS
Reverse engineering, interdisciplinary education, honours education, programming
CATEGORY
Poster Presentation
BACKGROUND
With the push for interdisciplinary education within the higher education settings, many of such programmes are designed to help students gain a wider perspective and develop a diverse skill set essential for addressing the complex challenges of the modern world (World Economic Forum, 2023). This means that students from wide-ranging backgrounds now learn together within the same classroom settings. While the exchange of perspectives from students’ different backgrounds add tremendous value to the classroom learning experience, the varying learning abilities and starting points of students bring new challenges to the instructors, especially in subjects that seek to impart technical knowledge, such as quantitative reasoning. The same learning experience now must seek to accommodate a spectrum of students: students with prior knowledge and who are likely to find the learning objective trivial; while students who have little background will struggle to play catchup when faced with new technical knowledge that they need to pick up within the short duration of the course.
To mitigate the challenge of diverse learning backgrounds, reverse engineering pedagogy (REP) (Tan, Cheah, & Lee, 2021) as a teaching method has been piloted in an earlier run of the authors’ sections of GEA1000N: Quantitative Reasoning with Data (Tan & Loo, 2024). Within the course, one of the learning objectives is for students to be familiar with R programming to handle large datasets (see Figure 1 for a sample of such activity). Students with limited prior programming knowledge may struggle to reconcile the theory with the programming tasks, while those with programming experience may find the tasks underwhelming. Below, we highlight some of the considerations in designing such activities:
Figure 1. Sample of reverse engineering learning activity implemented in the class.
DESIGN AND USER CONSIDERATIONS
Resources
The design of the activities needs to consider the resources allocated to the class, such as contact time within the classroom. For the REP activities, they were all designed to be completed within 30 minutes of the class, so that there will be sufficient time to complete other activities within the class.
Curriculum Structure
The activities need to situate itself well within the curriculum of the course, so that both instructors and students will not find the activity out of place during the learning process. This requires a careful consideration of the suitable timing to contact the learning activities. For the REP activities, they were introduced at the midpoint of the course in Week 5 and 7, since a theoretical minimum such as basic syntax, data structure, logical operators and loops would still be needed to be introduced earlier in the course to help students successfully navigate the RE activities; on the other hand, introducing the activities at midpoint will allow students to expose themselves R programming and subsequently use them in the later part of the course, especially in other in-class activities and projects. The RE activities also situates itself within the original activities that the teaching team have designed.
Instructors
The role of the instructor should not be overlooked as a key user of the activities, especially in the team-teaching context of the course. Given that the designer of the learning activities and the instructors delivering the materials may not be the same person, the learning activities should be intuitive and clear for the instructors for the buy-in.
Students
Students are the primary stakeholders of the learning activities and their appreciation towards the learning activities would therefore be important. To reconcile the challenges of varying learning background, the RE activities are deliberately conducted in small groups during the class, so that the less experienced students could learn from experienced students, while the experienced students could gain new perspectives from the questions or gaps in understanding from the less experienced students.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this work, the use of reverse engineering in the teaching of R programming is introduced. Earlier preliminary results have hinted at the potential of REP learning activities as potential strategy for classes with varying learning background. By highlighting the possible design considerations in the development of materials, it is hoped the approach would be useful for generalisation of such reverse engineering approaches to other courses of similar students’ background in technical subjects.
REFERENCES
Tan, D. Y., & Loo, Y. L. (2024). Reverse Engineering Pedagogy To Promote Confidence and Motivation in Programming Among Honors College Students. 2024 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 1 – 3). Kos Island, Greece: IEEE.
Tan, D. Y., Cheah, C. W., & Lee, C. H. (2021). Reverse Engineering Pedagogy as an Educational Tool to Promote Symbiosis between Design and Physics. IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (IEEE TALE). Wuhan, China. doi:10.1109/TALE52509.2021.9678692
World Economic Forum. (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. Geneva: World Economic Forum.