How to Create a Capsule

Know your goal

You should receive a list of questions from your instructor that your classmates are expected to be able to answer once they complete your capsule. One definition of "teach" is "to cause to learn". This is one way you should measure your teaching: did your classmates learn enough to answer the questions? (But you should not hand out these questions in class.)

Your task is to figure out how to accomplish this goal within the specified time limit (for example, 40 mins).

Constraints

Time limit: may depend on the capsule.
Team Participation: every member of your team must contribute to the preparation and delivery of your capsule.
Activity: you must design an activity to engage the class.
Assessment: you must have some method of determining during delivery if you are meeting your goal (i.e., are your classmates learning enough to be likely to answer the questions?)
Additional questions: you will also add 1-2 questions to the homework, which you will pass out in class.

Prepare

Ask yourself these questions:

Do I myself understand the material to be taught?
How can I motivate the problem?
What are the key concepts my classmates need to learn?
How can my classmates learn this material best? (discuss!)
How can I get feedback during this time that they understand it?

Prepare your materials. Practice your delivery (we can guarantee that if you don't plan, this will be way off)!

Deliver to the class

We'll expect each person in the team to contribute to the delivery of the capsule in some way.

Deliverables to instructors.

Checklist of who did what.

Grading

You will be graded on the following:

Effort
Organization
Creativity
Participation
Classmates' learning

Tools

We set up a Subversion repository for each section to use for the capsules, approriately named

csse221-01-capsule
csse221-02-capsule
csse221-03-capsule

You can upload any information you want to your section's repository for your classmates to download in class. Bear in mind that each section has read/write access to its whole repository, so data there is not secure from other people in your section.