I taught Celullar Networks and Android Internals at my alma mater just this past semester and can relate with TFA.
It took 4 to 6 hours of prep to deliver a one hour class. Preparing from existing course materials available online or from YouTube and Wikipedia was the fastest as opposed to going through the text books.
I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include. The feedback coming through wasn't real-time. I kept surprise open-notes tests to gauge where the class was lacking.
Students have a very short attention span. It is hard to keep them engaged throughout the period. I always start by summarising topics from the previous class. I also spoke to them multiple times and at length about concentration, but I guess the length was also a problem.
I believe some students are vehemently visual learners and prefer PPTs and videos. I shared links I thought were high quality with them via a Google doc and updated them every week.
Everyone used ChatGPT for assignments and some used it for preparing for exams.
It was jarring to see some students be in a perennial state of distraction (and be slave to their smartphones).
After the semester ended, with the money I earned taking the class (it wasn't much at all), I bought every student one among Pragmatic Programmer, Algorithms to Live By, Deep Work, Outliers, How Google Works, Why We Sleep. In the hope that it inculcates in them the habit reading books to progress in their careers.
I've taught HS kids for ~4 years so not quite the same demographic as yours. That said - and I know folks object to doing this - you have to play disciplinarian _and_ teacher. Set a firm culture around no phone usage and kick anyone out who uses one.
Kudos to you for going back to your alma mater and teaching. That's something I want to do, too.
That's another advantage of community college courses, is it may actually be practical to implement that sort of discipline. It certainly isn't when it's you and a TA and 100 students in a big lecture hall.
>I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include. The feedback coming through wasn't real-time. I kept surprise open-notes tests to gauge where the class was lacking.
Teaching is a skill. Over time you would be able to gauge these things easier.
Or you could do what some of my HS teaches and college professors used to do, and basically teach it how you see fit, and put the onus on the students to seek out help if they need it.
Is your android internals course available somewhere? It is a topic I have been meaning to learn more and there is not much out there that is up to date.
Unfortunately, it isn't; but multiple volumes available at http://newandroidbook.com are plenty enough for a beginner to get started. I also quite like Karim Yaghmour's Embedded Android which compares Android and generic Linux distros, but it is in urgent need of a new edition. Docs at https://source.android.com/ and in the sub-folders at https://cs.android.com/ are super neat; various Linaro.org, Linux Plumber Conf, and Google blogs / presentations on Android also have quite a few gems.
Android is vast and changes rapidly. Do you have a specific sub-system (like the runtime, graphics, audio, camera, telephony, system-services, ipc etc) in mind?
I gave a brief overview of these books and let students choose in the order they were seated. And if they didn't get the book they wanted, I suggested that they could borrow it from their classmates or buy one for themselves (everyone had a paid summer internship lined up already). Previously, I used to gift Thinking Fast and Slow but the replication crisis had me abandon it because at least two entire chapters (3 & 4) seem like pop-science now.
It took 4 to 6 hours of prep to deliver a one hour class. Preparing from existing course materials available online or from YouTube and Wikipedia was the fastest as opposed to going through the text books.
I found it very hard to know when to go fast and when to go slow, what to skip and what to include. The feedback coming through wasn't real-time. I kept surprise open-notes tests to gauge where the class was lacking.
Students have a very short attention span. It is hard to keep them engaged throughout the period. I always start by summarising topics from the previous class. I also spoke to them multiple times and at length about concentration, but I guess the length was also a problem.
I believe some students are vehemently visual learners and prefer PPTs and videos. I shared links I thought were high quality with them via a Google doc and updated them every week.
Everyone used ChatGPT for assignments and some used it for preparing for exams.
It was jarring to see some students be in a perennial state of distraction (and be slave to their smartphones).
After the semester ended, with the money I earned taking the class (it wasn't much at all), I bought every student one among Pragmatic Programmer, Algorithms to Live By, Deep Work, Outliers, How Google Works, Why We Sleep. In the hope that it inculcates in them the habit reading books to progress in their careers.