[Edu-sig] Encouraging students to plan effectively

[Jason L. Asbahr]

Great idea, Steve.  Using cards is nice and simple.  And it is a great
way to introduce ideas like "use cases" or "user stories".   

Here are some references to the usage of cards in the Extreme 
Programming community:

XP Roadmap (intro):
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgramming

Card-specific:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WriteItOnaCard

User stories:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UserStory

Also, Timothy, going so far as to actually enforce a planning process 
would probably backfire.  There are intrinsic rewards to various degrees 
of planning (better code, less frustrating debugging, potential for rapid 
adaptability to changing customer requirements), but they are not always 
obvious, especially to beginners.  

Explicitly *rewarding* ("bonus points") individuals and teams that plan 
(and plan well) might help ingrain the practice.  Up front reward for 
investing the energy in planning coupled with deferred reward as their 
projects run with more features and less debugging, yes, I think that 
might do it.  :-)

Cheers,

Jason






-----Original Message-----
From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On
Behalf Of Steve Howell
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 9:20 AM
To: Timothy Wilson
Cc: Python-Edu SIG
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Encouraging students to plan effectively


Timothy Wilson wrote:
> 
> Do you have a formal way of encouraging (enforcing?) a planning process?
> 

I would encourage a lightweight planning process, such as writing up a
bunch of index cards with tasks and then ordering the index cards
according to when tasks should be completed.

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