THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

School of Computer Science

SEM 207/208 Software Workshop Team Java

Semester 2 Team Exercise 2001

Notes for Demonstrators

The duties of demonstrators are as follows:

1. See each team regularly once a week. At this meeting you should:
   1. Keep a record of attendance for each team member. Anyone who is absent for two consecutive weeks should be reported to me immediately.
   2. Ask each member of the team to say what tasks have been allocated to him and what progress he has made since the previous week.
   3. Check that the team diary correctly records the allocation of work and the completion of work. Check that personal diaries are being kept up to date.
   4. Ask the team leader for his view on the overall progress of the team.
   5. Conduct a general discussion with the team on their progress, the particular aim being to identify areas of slow progress or other difficulties and to help the team decide how to remedy the problems.
   6. Assess the team on a scale of 0 (terrible) to 5 (excellent) in the following areas
      • progress
      • problem solving and teamwork
      • project management, risk assessment etc.
      • overall system architecture and design
      • functionality
      • overall impressions
2. At other times you should be prepared to discuss problems and answer questions on programming, etc.

The role of the demonstrator is to generally advise and encourage, but not to write programs for the students, or even debug programs for them. The approach should be to help them to find the solutions themselves, rather than just tell them the answer directly. It is important to realise that a major part of the demonstrator's role in this exercise is to advise on the problems of program development methodology in a team environment, as well as more normal problems such as debugging code.

Demonstrators should approach their task systematically, and encourage the students to do the same. In the regular weekly meetings with the teams, you should systematically go through the points listed above. Do not} allow digressions until all the routine discussion of progress has been completed. At the end you can throw the meeting open to a more wide-ranging discussion, including questions on detailed programming problems and anything else that the students want to raise. Any serious lack of progress should be reported to me as soon as possible.

Make brief notes on each of these regular meetings and keep a record of the time you spend on demonstrating activities. Keep your scores carefully in a spreadsheet, along with any special notes for my attention.

At the end of Week 5 of Semester 2, and again at the end of the term, all demonstrators will be required to submit to me a brief report giving the attendance record of each student and a brief overall assessment of each student (how much of a contribution have they made in their meetings with you, do they appear to have pulled their weight in the team, or have they been particularly uncooperative with the rest of their team, etc.). You may be asked to assist in the evaluation of the final project when it is demonstrated. Demonstrators' duties will end when the second report has been submitted and all the marks under the categories for each week have been submitted.

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