2000 Computer Science Honours & Masters Retreat

Overview

This year's honours/masters retreat took place at the Whaler's Inn in Victor Harbour on 6th-8th April. The retreat was attended by 8 honours students, 7 master's students, 3 PhD students (Gao Ping, William Brodie-Tyrrell and Darren Webb), Cheryl Pope, Dave Munro and Charles Lakos.

Once again the retreat was a great success and probably more so than last year since we had a good mix of honours and masters students. The timetabled events included a short individual talk by each student, team debates and group discussions. A reasonable amount of time was set aside to allow for social interaction. Ping and Darren discussed their view of post-graduate studies at Adelaide.

The students were given free choice for their talk subjects. This afforded opportunities for the students to give relaxed presentations on topics of their own personal interests and hobbies. We were rewarded with a series of interesting, stimulating and often amusing talks.

William conducted two debates on the following topics:

• That the iMac is the perfect teaching tool for 1^st year CS
• That strongly typed languages are for wusses

The debates were treated with great enthusiasm by most participants and much acrimony resulted. Chocolates and other sugary substances were awarded to the teams that elicited the most noise from the audience at the end of the debate, whether they deserved them or not.

Discussion

A discussion on the students' opinions on their undergraduate and honours experience generated significant debate. Some of their comments and suggestions are outlined below.

• Equipment
  More chairs required in Honours lab; no other adverse comments.
• Environment
  Air conditioning is turned off at 1800, making work after hours difficult.
• Courses
  
  • Little concern over jump in difficulty from 3^rd year to honours
  • Concern over breadth of subject choices, very strong concurrency focus at present, desire exists for work in AI, graphics, databases, modelling techniques and software engineering
  • Proposed that 3^rd years given list of all subjects and those with most takers go ahead, as per Maths dept
  • Desire exists for instruction on analysis and critique of research and research writing
  • Concern over discouraging honours students from doing Advanced Software Engineering
  • Computer Security course was requested, possibly with more technical and theoretical basis than that seen in Flinders
• Projects
  
  • Suggested that retreat be held before honours proposal talks to give students confidence and practise in speaking
  • Specifications provided by staff were vague but generally sufficient
  • More time to research topics was desired so that a more informed choice could be made between supervisors
  • Students need to be encouraged to speak with potential supervisors while in 3^rd year
• Transition to Honours from Undergraduate
  Discussed modification of course so that honours spans two years for a gentler rise in learning difficulty (as per English system).
• The Value Of- and Reasons For Doing Honours
  
  • Some felt that a lot of effort (+35-40%) was required for only an incremental improvement in qualification
  • Often this degree (honours) is the minimum required by employers
  • Differentiates students from the hordes
  • Permits real work overseas where 4-year degrees often required
  • Different (independent) learning skills required
  • Realisation of broader range of topics
  • Much deeper understanding of a topic
  • Desire to join academia (someone actually mentioned this!)
  • Experience in research skills, eg technical & paper writing
• Masters Program
  
  • Topic coverage too narrow
  • Limited choice in subjects due to placement in semesters
  • Need to broaden choice or permit students to sign-up to or vote on subjects held
• Miscellany
  
  • Students should be made aware of and encouraged to attend ACUE courses, particularly in thesis writing
  • We Don't Like COBOL (tm)
    Want opportunity to consider (in undergraduate course) databases with more focus on the theory and practise of databases

Attendees

	Dave Munro
	Cheryl Pope
	Charles Lakos	How to escape difficult presentations with the aid of a mobile phone
	Darren Webb	Why we should PhD
	Gao Ping	Towards a PhD
	William Brodie-Tyrrell	The art of looking glum in photographs
	Adam Limbert	Texas
	Jarungjit Parnjai	Thai Food
	Edwin Chan	Hong Kong
	Joseph Kuehn	BOFH for Beginners
	Debzani Deb	Bangladesh
	Nic Smelt	Firefighting & the Chorister
	Martin Schumacher	Tatachilla Campsite
	Matthew Swan	Model Rocketry
	Kath Mickan	Questioning the Fundamentals Part I: The Importance of Nostrils
	Diana Howard	The MacLibel Trial
	Abidin Yusof	Malaysia
	Muztaba Fuad	That Computers are Female
	Evan Bourlotos	Why I want to be a Pokemon Trainer
	Travis Olds	Vegetable Propulsion Systems: the Potato Cannon
	Richard Zschech	Proposed Manned Mission to Mars