Post #1520364

2026-04-21 06:06 UTC

In my undergrad programming languages course, I ask people to answer some questions in every lecture. I used to do this with online forms, but this time, I went low-tech and started using paper slips. Best decision ever! It&#39;s so much more fun! People draw stuff, they add comments in the margins, their personalities come through. It&#39;s faster, too, than waiting for people to get out devices and log in and so on. And high-speed scanning + Gradescope makes it logistically easy to manage paper.

Replies (4)

@lindsey@recurse.social 2026-04-21 06:24

Anyway, with the time I save, I can now ask two or three questions per lecture instead of one or two, so now I ask two course-content-related ones, and the third one is always a poll where I put up pictures of two of the students' pets and ask which is cuter, because what else would it be? I hope someone asks to see the "slides from my class", because I can then truthfully send them all the slides I've used, which consist entirely of pictures of cute dogs.

Open ##1657051
@jfdm@discuss.systems 2026-04-21 09:14

@lindsey great colleagues of mine do this, and even have a competition for best drawing…

Open ##1657056
@benfulton@fosstodon.org 2026-04-21 10:31

@lindsey So people come up and deposit their bits of paper in a scanner? What's the class size?

Open ##1657058
@liamoc@types.pl 2026-04-21 10:45

@lindsey physicality is actually super important. I'm considering starting a punch card programming lab at ANU. (I'm serious.)

Open ##1657061