Overview and Rationale for Teams in 3110

Teams are communities in which students learn to program together, and in which members help each other to master course material. Your 3110 team will consist of three or four students from your discussion section. In section, your team will be asked to work together to solve problems and to help one another understand solutions. In lecture, your team will be asked to sit next to one another for the same reason. Teams will complete programming assignments together.

What Teamwork Offers You

We are stronger together. A team can be a network of support, a place to get quick help, a venue to share joys and frustrations, a group to hold one another accountable, and so much more. And teams are the norm in industry, building bigger and better software than one person could do alone.

Teamwork is a skill that you can develop, just like programming. Now is a good time to develop it. We’d like to help you do that.

How Teams Will Work

Beginning with the third weekly programming assignment, your team will work together to solve the assignment, and will submit a single solution under all your names. (In other words, you will form a CMS group.) All team members are responsible for learning the entire technical content of an assignment. Exams will include questions specifically about assignments, to assess whether each team member individually has mastered the material.

Teamwork will be a focus of assignments. Your team will be asked to establish expectations in writing, assign and rotate through roles, and conduct peer ratings of teamwork—not technical ability. Based on those peer ratings of good team citizenship, the component of the overall course grade devoted to assignments will be adjusted up or down for individual team members.

No doubt conflict will arise in solving assignments together. Part of teamwork is managing conflict. We expect you to handle it professionally. The course staff will be available to help you with that. In the worst case, it will be possible for “management” (the professor) to remove a team member, but not before a serious attempt is made to address the issues at hand by both sides.

How Teams Will Be Formed

When you join a company, you will not be given the option to work alone, or which people from the company directory would be your dream team. Instead, you’ll be assigned to a team. Your team won’t consist of people just like you, or people you’ve worked with before, or friends. Yet your performance reviews will reflect the extent to which you are capable to being effective in that team.

Likewise, teams in this course will be formed by “management” (the professor). The intent is to form teams that poised to be successful. The primary criteria that will be used are working time preferences, diversity, and academic background.

Your first team will be formed near the beginning of the semester. After you complete four assignments together, all teams will be dissolved, and new (instructor-formed) teams will be formed for the remainder of the semester, using the same criteria. But any team that unanimously wishes to remain together will not be dissolved, and we will rejoice with you over the camaraderie that has been achieved.

We acknowledge that some students in the course will be unhappy with instructor-formed teams, preferring instead to work with their friends and past project partners from other courses. But we will not honor such requests, for a couple reasons:

  1. The surging size of CS courses has caused the process of finding partners to become unmanageable for students. That leads to unfortunate situations that harm students, especially if they do not have an established social network.

  2. Diverse teams can improve learning outcomes for all students by helping us to learn from one another. Demographic diversity helps us to learn an attitude of respect and inclusion, and brings varied and creative ideas to bear. Academic diversity helps us to learn as a community. Students who are weaker on a particular topic have the ability to consult with and be mentored by those students on their team who are stronger. Conversely, students who are stronger are given the opportunity to help teach their peers, thereby solidifying their own learning. Indeed, as teachers will attest, the real measure of understanding something is the ability to explain it to others.

Acknowledgement: the teamwork materials in this semester’s course are adapted from “Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams”, Barbara Oakley, Richard M. Felder, Rebecca Brent, and Imad Elhajj, Journal of Student-Centered Learning, volume 2, number 1, 2004, pp. 9–34.