TDDD56 Multicore and GPU Programming (6 ECTS)

Autumn2 2023

Mid-Term Evaluation with Muddy Cards

The course TDDD56 has been mid-term evaluated with the muddy card method in the third week, Lecture 7, on thursday 17 november 2016 08:00-10:00. 20 students attended the lecture, and I received 19 cards.

Summary

By and large, the result is clearly positive. One third of the cards were exclusively positive, no card was exclusively negative.

Contents:
The course contents is perceived as interesting and challenging, with a good balance of theory and practice, as stated by several cards.
Two cards point out that not all students attending the course have a strong or recent background in computer science and have difficulties to follow in some cases, while another card says that the labs can be done even without having taken a course in concurrent programming and operating systems before.
One card states the overlap of several (CPU) lectures with TDDC78, which had been announced and is unavoidable to make both courses self-contained.

Labs:
At the time of the evaluation, most students are working on their second CPU lab.
Many cards praise the labs so far (challenging, interesting, right level of difficulty, well documented, helpful for understanding the theory, fun) and the lab assistants (competent, giving the right amount of help, responsive).
A few cards find the labs tough or desire clearer lab instructions.

Lab rooms and times:
Three cards complain about the mandatory presence for the labs, leading to much traveling for Norrköping-based students. Two cards state that there are issues with ssh access to the Multicore lab computers (outside scheduled hours), and one of them asks for longer opening hours of the Multicore lab.
Comment: We had indeed asked for 4-hour lab slots for groups A and B, which also had worked well in previous years, but this year the central scheduling service at LiTH messed it up and we had to fix the schedule later by inserting additional 2-hour slots to provide enough lab time for all groups.

Lectures/Lessons:
Also the lectures and lessons get mostly positive comments. Lectures are perceived as interesting and coherent with the labs. The slide material is appreciated. One card mentions the lecturing pace being somewhat slow at times.
One card also suggest that Lesson 1 should be held as (part of) a lecture. (Comment: We actually had that setup in earlier years, but due to my scheduling constraints it was not possible this year).

Other aspects:
The option of participating in the sorting competition is appreciated.
One card recommends to update the list of recommended literature on the course homepage.

Thanks to everybody for the overall very constructive and encouraging feedback!

Christoph Kessler, examinator TDDD56

Page responsible: Christoph W Kessler
Last updated: 2016-11-20