Designing a creative coding unit for student cohorts with a lot of differentiation in coding background
Contextual background
Last year, I taught on the Coding One: Advanced Creative Coding module on the MA/MSc Computing and Creative Industry (Modular) programme at CCI. The unit was originally designed for students with coding experience, which is not a prerequisite for the Modular programme. I was tasked with re-designing the curriculum for the needs of students with various levels of programming experience, ranging from complete beginners to professional developers.
Evaluation
I did my best to re-design the unit and prepare the teaching materials from scratch within my AL hours. Based on my Action Research Project from the last term (focusing on a different module) – both in terms of literature review and student feedback, I know that a lot of the gut feelings I’d had about how to improve the situation are correct. These include posting more class materials with varied resources in terms of media and difficulty level, prompts for creative tasks for students, and splitting tasks into smaller fragments building on one another.
Moving forward
In short: I find placing the responsibility of re-designing a unit on an AL without appropriate extra preparation time unjust and unethical, both towards the lecturer and the students. I found it impossible to prepare high quality materials accounting for diverse student needs within the expected timeframe. The result is either unpaid work or unhappy students.
I did my best within reasonable working hours and prioritised explaining the basics well so that everyone could pass. More advanced students were not happy, leading to permanent staff taking over the unit this year and me having to look for other opportunities. I don’t have a good solution to this problem and last academic year left me feeling extremely tired and frankly, bitter.
There are, however, a few general opportunities for improvement that I found:
- Prioritise continuity in teaching, so that classes can be improved gradually every year and feedback implemented. This is only partially up to the AL. This could be seen as an implementation of existing design strategies such as Agile Design (in terms of adaptivity. Interaction Design Foundation, 2024) and Iterative Design (iterative improvements based on feedback and observation, Zimmermann, 2003), and applying these to designing curricula and teaching materials.
- Talk to the students during classes, check in frequently about the teaching pace, and provide feedback options through various modalities. It’s important offer anonymous feedback options, and to have these conversations throughout the term, not just at the end, and to respect and try to implement that feedback.
- More advanced students are usually comfortable with self-directed learning. They mostly need materials such as links to tutorials, technical references, and articles. Still, finding interesting advanced topics and good quality resources takes time, a scarce resource for an AL-Unit Leader. Being able to build on previous year’s materials helps.
- Normalising learning struggles and setting expectations. If I know a topic is difficult, I clearly address that in class. I refer to my own learning experience in the process and explain why they may want to practise a particular skill. E.g.: “It took me 2 years to learn git properly and I broke things on the way. I don’t expect you to fully understand it within a week. But if you choose to work in the industry, this skill will be most likely expected of you. It’s also useful in cases XYZ. You can start by learning these 3 functionalities: …”.
References
Interaction Design Foundation – IxDF. (2024). What is Agile Design? Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/agile-design (accessed: 01.04.2025).
Zimmermann, E. (2003). Play as Research: the Iterative Design Process, in: Design research: Methods and perspectives, 2003, pp. 176-184.