Evaluation Comments

Summary View

What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?

• The instructor is very nice, very respectful, and very knowledgable. Though I wish the lectures were better geared at helping students understand the material on the exams.
• Good: He really knows his stuff and can switch from one scenario to another quickly as the students need. I really like how, given that the lectures were all recorded, the class time became open office hours for further explanation.

What aspects of this course were most beneficial to you?

• The professor is a great guy who wants his students to learn and do well.
• online classes really helped me alot.
• Organized material and expectations. Very respectful to students.
• Learning scala programming.
• Comparing concepts across different programming languages helped me to start to understand what the real issues are.

What suggestions do you have that could help improve the course?

• I am not positive a multiple-choice midterm and final are fair ways to test the knowledge of these topics, but I'm not sure of a better way to do it.
• perfect
• Use lectures instead of pre-recorded material and dive deeper into the content instead of giving shallow explanations to problems.
• This is not a criticism of the current course, but a suggestion for an add-on. I think it would be interesting to pursue these same issues from a cognitive-science viewpoint. That is, what is it about humans that make some programming constructs useful for us and others too confusing? (The computers don't care.) Maybe extend these ideas by making this a two-quarter sequence?

Do you have comments on the grading procedures and exams?

• NA
• Many questions on the timed quizzes involve solving puzzles. While these were all relevant, sometimes it took a while for my brain to "click" onto the right track to scratch out the answer. Then the timing becomes an issue. Maybe have fewer puzzles or more time? I like the instant grading for the quizzes.

Other comments?

• Finally a great class at DePaul. Wish I could take another class with this Professor Reily as he's clearly a funny and amazing person and teacher.
• Nope.