Course Structure

Duckietown may be used to teach in different ways.

Classical (Frontal) Teaching

We provide many resources in the form of lecture slides and recordings that can be useful for a traditional frontal teaching style.

In this setup, the instructor lectures and the students take notes and answer questions.

Flipped Classroom

An alternative method of structuring your course is to implement a flipped classroom. In this paradigm, students should be exposed to the material before the class, for example, by looking at the slides and watching the videos, and then time in class is spent helping students work on a task.

The Jupyter notebooks that accompany the learning experiences can be a great option for this type of approach.

A third natural option that we have used extensively is a hybrid of the two (classical and flipped). Particularly if your class sessions are long (longer than 45 minutes), research shows that students have a very difficult time focusing for this amount of time. So a good option can be to alternate between classical lecturing styles and then work together on the notebooks in small groups.

Project-based classes

Structuring learning around the achievement of a concrete goal in a small group is beneficial to ensuring engagement from all learners. For resources related to projects see Projects.

We typically find that groups of 3-5 students can effectively self-organize and collaborate to achieve a goal.

This requires oversight from the course staff. Some class time can be allocated to project meetings where the course staff goes to each group individually to assess progress and offer suggestions.