Reaction for: MI and Teaching Strategies by Adam

This paper was an interesting look into alternate teaching styles which might be useful to reach more students, but some of the methods that are suggested are pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure how much a story about the mystical powers of cs would help :-).

Despite the questionable value of some of the teaching techniques in the paper, it did make me think about how people learn. It's important to make information accessible to the greatest number of people, not just those who learn well in the traditional class format.

The paper describes five distinct learning styles; I think that adapting a computer science course to cater more to one of these alternate styles wouldn't be so hard. For example, for those with interpersonal intelligence, more discussion groups and one on one opportunities with tas and other students could prove to be greatly beneficial.

Perhaps one of the goals of this GISP might be to examine how cs15 is taught and what we can do to make it more accessible to those who don't learn well under the traditional lecture format. Adapting the course to better fit one or more of these models would be an interesting exercise.


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