My new favorite session at SIGSCE is "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Panelists share something they tried in or with their classes that they thought would be awesome. It wasn't. then they shared either how they tried to fix it or left it open ended. It's a lot of fun and for the two years I've attended the most interesting and valuable session.

I wish though, that there was a presenter that shared something about a specific lesson and how that failed - most if not all of the talks I've been to in this session were always a little tangential to the actual class content. I do understand this - it's hard to get up in front of a room of people and say "I failed" though I'm going to try to find something, the bigger the better that I can share at a future SIGCSE, I mean, I've been doing this for 33+ years so I've got to have tons of failures to draw from.

Dan Garcia - one of the session organizers said that he hoped, and I'm paraphrasing, that this session would dive deeper into what we actually do - teach - and he's right. That the session always had good discussion, good material, and some laughts. Dan posed the question of who actually gets to laugh when developing curriculum. He was right about the session but I'll dispute his final point. When I'm working with my team on curriculum, lessons, and in fact anything education there are lots of laughs. Our problem is we descend into "the stupid" and things take us eight times as long as it should.

The only other thing was that last year, the organizers asked for questions or suggested solutions at the end, this time only questions. I think it's important to explicitly call to the audience for both.

There were five "failures" but my next two posts will focus on two of them. First up will be Lauren Bricker from the University of Washington. Her topic involved deadline extensions on student projects. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke also talked about deadlines. That's my next post.

After that, I'll look at David Malan of Harvard and CS50 fame and his "failure." The other speakers were also great but I didn't come away with any interesting extras to write about.