Cancelled due to COVID-19 campus closure
Goals: The aim of this project is to present a portion of a lecture to the class in the classroom setting. The portion will nominally be about 1/4 to 1/3 of a full lecture (20-25 minutes) and will be developed as part of a team. Students will discover that comprehending the material at the depth required to explain it to others in a classroom provides a new level to the learning experience. This course component will also serve as a training forum for future enterprises students will undertake as Teaching Assistants, providing a general training in presenting concepts and ideas to your peers in a formal setting, forums that students will encounter in a wide variety of future careers. Past experience has demonstrated that students find this Teaching Project a really rewarding portion of the pedagogy: a principal goal is that you should have fun doing this!
Protocols: The teams will be allocated by Prof. Baring according to constraints imposed by the course enrollment, with the optimal team size being 4 students, and the maximum being 6. The purpose of team-teaching is (i) to develop a cohesive structure to the full lecture(s) and (ii) to learn from each other as you prepare the material. Your understanding will be enhanced by the team format just like it is when exchanging ideas on the path to solutions for problem sets. Prof. Baring will provide notes to the lecture(s) about 2 weeks prior to the teaching date, and pointers to the appropriate pages in the textbook. Students may go beyond the notes in incorporating illustrative material to embellish the lecture, yet this should not be at the cost of reduced core content, clarity or flow of the whole lecture.
Assessment: Credit will be given most for showing your understanding and for the clarity of your presented material. Some credit will be assigned to the cohesive whole of the lecture, so that a coordinated "dry run" by the team of the entire lecture beforehand is strongly recommended. Credit will also be given for incisive responses to any questions asked by the other students. Students will be required to adhere fairly closely to their equal portion of the allocated lecture time, and serious time over-runs by a particular student will result in a reduction of credit for that individual.