Durham University, Techno-Café [CETL for Active Learning In Computing]

Background & Context

The University had IT facilities of two kinds: lecturing style where each student had their own machine and all of them faced a central facility (such as an OHP or projector) and labs with desks. Both tried to provide as many PCs in an individual space as could possibly be achieved.

A requirement for all Computer Science courses who have British Computer Society Accreditation is to do a significant group work project within the second year and Durham struggled to be able to get the students to be able to operate effectively within the IT labs because the labs weren't supportive of group activity. Half the group was spread across one half of the room and the others were facing them. Large PC monitors blocked sight lines and there was little room on the desk because of the high volumes of machines that were in the room.

The ethos of the Techno-Café was that an individual should be able to work in a team environment that is facilitated by computers but not driven by them.

Durham designed the space then employed an architect to put it together and to make it real. An IT lab and a seminar room were knocked into one and a bespoke seating arrangement was designed.

Beforehand there was a lot of paper documentation whereas now electronic communication is used. The lighting was designed to be cost effective in terms of energy. They also try to get individuals to take responsibility for turning the equipment off. This was a 'hopeless situation' within the old labs but students look after this equipment because they know for instance the plasma screens suffer from burns if they do leave them on.

At the very beginning students participate in a group exercise called a 'sustainability workshop'. The students have a scenario that they are a company and they want to enter a competition and they must look at how they operate as a company to win a sustainability award. In this way Durham tries to encourage sustainability not only by setting appropriate standards itself but also by getting students to consider the active choices that they make.

Many spaces in the past have been defined by activities that you couldn't do in the facility e.g. you couldn't use a mobile phone, you couldn't eat/drink and many of them encouraged or promoted silence. Few staff would be prepared to operate in that as a working environment and yet students were expected to work a minimum of two hours at a time in such laboratories.

The Techno-Café has bar facilities and a vending machine within the room and there is no restriction on the use of any form of technology. The group work areas consist of booths or 'pods' each with a central table, laptops and tablet PCs and a large 48-inch plasma screen at one end of the booth which each of the students can tap into their PC so that they can demonstrate to the rest of the group what they are doing and share documents etc. The pods have backlighting and top lighting facilities for students to dim the lights. They are supportive of the use of individuals who may be doing a presentation and there is a degree of soundproofing between the booths so that one group of students isn't disturbing another.

There are ten booths: two larger booths for eight students and the remainder for six plus a tutor.

The basic technology is supplemented by free 'hiring' schemes and allowing the facility for students to bring their own. The whole place is wireless networked; there are plenty of permanent connections where the students can plug into the network and also plenty of spaces where they can plug in laptops directly to the power supply.

Durham has a collaborative project where students do a joint development - where half the team works within Newcastle University and the other half works within Durham University. Together they have to produce a single piece of software. Communication across the two sites is encouraged which means the students need mobile phones to send text messages and they need Skype facilities.

The development is generating interest from industry and part of the intention was to better prepare students for the kind of role that they would have to work in outside the University life. Industry doesn't develop software on a particular site with a particular group that happens to be sitting in a co-located area. Sometimes they may be working with people in Spain or people in Edinburgh and this kind of collaborative activity is probably one of the first times that it has been attempted within UK HE. Tying the two university timetables together to enable the students to be available at the same time was in itself a challenge.

Students actually emulate something that they will then see when they actually go and work in large development companies. IBM has visited to talk about some of the problems and realities of the situation that they are working in. The problems the students are facing are the problems that IBM and all the national and international companies have to operate with every day.

The Techno-Café demonstrates quite clearly the relationship between the work in changing the academic curriculum within the Computer Science programme and the way in which the capital build can be used to better support students to achieve both the current objectives of a traditional programme and the modern and upcoming ideas behind about changing the Computer Science curriculum to bring in these participatory activities.

Students start off with a basic set of requirements and they have to look at them creatively to come up with a system that is going to be attractive to the customer. Teams compete against one another and that encourages them to be enterprising and creative in terms of the interface and functionality they provide.

In 2007 the brief is that the customer would like jogging route planning and tracking software that allows them to record particular runs, to tell how many hills they went up and the speed that they went at and also to compare run after run after run. The students have also been given a PDA and GPS module to integrate.

The groups will do some domain analysis, see what's out there and then come up with a set of requirements and ultimately a design. They take it through every stage of the software lifecycle from the creation and the formation of the idea, the requirements of the customer and what they want to add into the system, the design and implementation and testing. Finally they have a 'trade fair' where all the student groups try to market their ideas by giving demonstrations etc.

Basically this is trying to emulate exactly what happens in industry. The software is developed through a standard lifecycle approach and it is for the students to do their own time planning and work out how to facilitate it. One of the more interesting challenges of computing today is how you make systems usable and fun to use. Something like the Ipod is a good indication as how computing can become so pervasive, so small and so portable and yet with so many different uses. Durham uses the group space to facilitate use of devices such as this and the sharing of documents as well as the actual encoding and testing of software.

Durham avoids describing the space as a teaching room, lab or suite because all of those start to communicate to the students that this is a traditional means of teaching. They want students to see it as is their space so only refer to it as the Techno-Café although it is technically a suite of group work spaces.

It has been used for a broad range of activities: teaching, examinations, induction and tutorials. A tutorial at Durham would typically be around six students for an hour doing activities. Much of the academic's time is just waiting for the students to complete their work so now they are able to run several groups of tutorials at one time. The end of the booth is open which means that a demonstrator facilitating a more traditional lab lesson or an academic leading a tutorial can see and communicate effectively with the students within the booth.

When students tried to collaborate in the old style labs if one of them moved up or down a row they disturbed all the others within that row because students tend to bring sports equipment etc with them. The whole room was full of students and hockey sticks and it just wasn't feasible for them to be able to move.