See if I can walk and talk the same time. So I'm David Keithley I'm
a principal lecturer in computer science and engineering. And for the few of you
who know me know this story but I kind of took a winding path to academia so I
started out, after I graduated college, working in military systems and then I
moved into commercial systems and then I spent about ten years as an entrepreneur
with my own business and then I decided to join academia. And that's relevant to
the story I'm going to tell, at least one of them, because about two years after I
came to UNT our department started a new program in Computer Engineering and one
things that we wanted to add to that program was a capstone experience. Was a
two semester sequence. And at the time the chair thought I was the natural
person to teach it since I'd spent almost 20 years in industry so I
understood the process. So he asked me to do that and the first couple
of offerings went pretty straightforward. Because we had very small groups who had
the new students who were coming into this program and we had five or six
students in capstone so I could really focus on working them
individually but as the course grew, I started struggling with how do I
take something that's non-academic and how do I put it into an academic context
and how do I evaluate students in academic context. So one things
that I that I learned is even our students in engineering who are supposed
to be good at math will tell you they're not good at math until the week thirteen
of the semester and then suddenly they can compute their grade point to five
decimal digits of precision and they can tell you exactly how many points they
need to make the grade they want which is not the attitude I want in a capstone
class. But I had already succumbed to that context myself so before I go any
further I want to give you the three points that I want you to get today
because otherwise I might forget. So the first is change the context if you're
looking for a truly unique academic experience change the context. The second
is, flip the experience, much like some people talked about flipping the
classroom. We'll talk about how that applies in a minute. And then the third
which is the hardest one as an academic to do and that's release the reins. Give
the horse the ability to go where it wants to go, so to speak. So those are the
three points I want you to look for the opportunities for those in this story. So
I started really struggling with this and of course the students are
feeding that because they want to know well exactly how many points is this
going to be worth and exactly what do you expect in this requirement
specification or this design document. And of course my traditional answer is
it depends because every projects different every client is different
because these capstone projects they have a client outside the university
typically sometimes we do some in-house projects too but they have to work with
people who have different sets of expectations. And so you know the first
lesson I learned for myself first and then I had to address how to how to get
it to the students and that is change the context so what I tried one semester
and I've been doing it ever since and we've now done about 13 years of these
capstone courses and we've added it to other programs, as well, is I walked into
class, the first day of class, and I told everybody once class started I said,
"Welcome to a capstone senior design and I want everybody to leave your stuff get
up and leave the room. I want you to walk out." In fact, some years, if the
weather was nice, Id' say, "Meet me in the parking lot." Now if you know engineering
we're out at Discovery Park so we're not on main campus. Now Discovery Park has an
interesting history because it used to be a Texas Instruments manufacturing
plant so it was very industrial. So we walk out, I knew they'd come back in the
room or they'd meet me in the parking lot and I said, "Okay I want you to forget
everything you know about the classes you've taken for the last three years.
Okay. This is not a course. This is a job. And so we're gonna do this whole thing
as if you're at a job. This is your first job. You have a client granted they're
not paying you you're gonna get a grade but it's a job so I want you to take it
from that context and then I'm gonna also approach it from that context. So
when you give presentations about your design think of me as an investor. I'm
not your teacher I'm an investor. You're trying to convince me to invest in your
idea, in your product, in your design. And it made a big difference. Then I had
another serendipitous occurrence and that is I had some students who'd had
the course previously come back and go, "You know this turned out to be a much
better course than I thought it was but I didn't realize it until I got out into
industry. Because all the stuff you taught us that we were groaning about
because we had to write all these documents and do all this stuff that's
exactly what I've been spending the last year of my life doing.
So I kind of wish I'd paid more attention and maybe not been as mean to
you about it." Okay, so I said, "That's good to know. What I really like you to do now
is go tell that to my students." So I now have about 15 students who on a random
rotating basis, sometimes via Skype, so we use technology as well because some of
them are in San Francisco and other places, is in the beginning weeks of that
first course, that first capstone course, they talked to the students about, "Here's
why this is important. Don't just do it because Keithley said so and there's a
grade associated with it but do it because this is what your job is going
to entail and this is what your employers expect." And coincidentally most
people don't learn this in school so when you go out there you're gonna
really impress your employers that you already know how to do this and you've
already been through this process and you've made mistakes and you've learned
from them because most people have to go through that in their first job as
opposed to having already done it before they get here. So I think that's a really
worthwhile experience. So flipping the experience, I'm the investor; I'm not the
instructor. Changing the context. This is a job not a course and then giving them
the reins to give them ideas about how to do it. I don't require specific ways
they do presentation so that I just have it students do YouTube videos for their
presentations or go out and give demonstrations out in the field or in
the parking lot and things like that. So they have an opportunity to do it in the
way that fits them the most. And a couple other stories but it looks like I'm
starting to run out of time but I'll try one more. Sometimes it also works in the
context of an individual student. So I'm not going to give her name but we had a
student that came to our summer camps. We do robotics and mobile app development
summer camps in the summers and we had a student several years ago, homeschool
student, very very timid, she came and she was obviously very very bright but
literally looked like she was gonna have a heart attack every time I spoke to her.
And so she came into camp for two years and then we had a program at that time
where that we gave scholarships to students who came to camp. So she came to
UNT in computer science and again was still fairly timid but obviously very
very bright and so I asked her to be one of our camp counselors. She'd been to
camp for two years. She knew what we did and gave her that opportunity to come
the first year she did a good job but she was the kind of person who would
volunteer to like take the robots apart at the end
of camp or go run and make sure the lunch got there didn't want to have to
interact with the students very much she was very scared to do that. By the second
year she was pretty good at doing that and so by the third year, in flipping the
experience, I started asking her to run the camp okay and teach the other
students who were my counselors to do the camp and by the fourth year and this
is that aha moment when when you feel really proud that you've helped
somebody get past their shortcomings, if you will, was a particular semester we
were doing a bunch of camps and I during the summer I was also teaching and I'm
an advisor so I had to go do orientations and we were doing a camp in
Louisville at a middle school and during the summer and I had to come back to
Denton to meet my class do an orientation and then go back to camp. And
so I I told all the counselors, "Okay I'm leaving I'll be back in about two to
three hours." And she boldly walked up to me looked at me straight in the face and
goes, "You know, I know you're busy and you're probably tired so if you don't
want to come back this afternoon after that orientation we got this." (Laughs) So that was
an interesting moment for me and I'll share one more story because the time
keeps changing. And this is another informal education story and... Oh it's
red that's why. Okay never mind. So remember, change the context, flip the
experience, release the reins. Thank you. (Applause)
you