FlorkPal

What are some variants of the FlorkPal assignment?

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As of now, there are no known variants, but the assignment can be adapted to CS3–4 level courses* and even other project-based courses within the Engineering disciplines. The assignment has been debuted to 70 students in two sections of a CS capstone course, and it has received positive feedback from the students. In the following semester, the FlorkPal assignment will be deployed to three sections of the Senior Design capstone, totaling 120 students, so it will be exciting to gather further feedback.

Some of the variants I can expect in the future include introducing the assignment to students in other upper-level CS project-based courses and perhaps presenting it to graduate students taking the Intro to Teaching course as a sample assignment they could adapt for their classrooms.

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What general lessons can be learned from the structure of the FlorkPal assignment?

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• Relating the assignment to actual project-based tasks that students will be working on during the semester is important.

• Because FlorkPal would take the form of a CS educational toy, it was chosen as a medium that students can relate to and would find engaging. Their feedback indicates that this came across successfully.

• Varying the individual tasks and diversifying the assignment (i.e. adapting some tasks to pair work) could also make the assignment more intriguing.

• Giving guidelines for adapting FlorkPal to other courses in the Computer Science Department as well as other fields in the College of Engineering could make the assignment even more useful and might lead to some exciting pedagogical outcomes that could filter back into the CS curriculum. 

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*FlorkPal has only been deployed in a CS4-level course thus far, though it could be refined for a CS3 project-based course or even an advanced CS2 course. Elements of the activity could be adapted to a CS1 or early CS2 classroom, though I have not yet tried to do so.