Strategies in designing a media computing course to provide a discovery-enriched curriculum to students with diverse technical background

Abstract

In this paper, we share our experience in designing a media computing course that aims to teach creative media students who had a diverse technical background. We describe several strategies in the course design and delivery that is aligned with our discovery enriched curriculum. Firstly, we designed the learning materials with visual content that is related to students’ real life to stimulate their interest. Secondly, we catered for students’ diverse background by designing learning tasks with different levels of difficulty. We also offered different means of help to the students in case they faced any problems. Our design of the learning and assessment tasks encouraged students to make self-discovery and innovation. An empirical study is conducted by analyzing the relationship between several factors for a selected group of students. The relationship between the students’ homework grade and their attendance in the laboratory illustrates a positive trend, showing that students who attended our laboratory more often got better scores in the homework. Moreover, the relationship between students’ homework grade and their quiz grade also illustrates a positive trend, showing that the design of our laboratory tasks was well aligned with the quiz assessments to help students master the concepts in this course such that we can adjust our focus to put more emphasis on certain topics based on the strength and weakness demonstrated by the students in the homework.