School of Computer Science Seminar Michael Young - "FeedbackHelper 5.0, and what it taught me about academic software development"

Speaker: Michael Young

Title: FeedbackHelper 5.0, and what it taught me about academic software development

Abstract: FeedbackHelper is a tool for efficiently creating bullet-pointed feedback on student assignments. It exploits the fact that certain phrases are likely to be repeated many times when marking one assignment for a large class of students, automatically recognising frequently used phrases and making it easy to import them for new students.

I spent last semester on “education development leave”, with the goal of improving FeedbackHelper to the point where it would be suitable for use across the University and beyond. Along the way I learned a lot about software engineering, user-focused design and human nature. The result is a tool I'm much less ashamed of, and intend to share widely in the coming months.

The talk will include a short demo of the software, along with a history of the project and a handful of interesting things that occurred to me while I was working on it.

Bio: Michael is an education-focused lecturer with a background in computational algebra and more recent interests in pedagogy, programming language design, tangible computing and AI. He was a student in the School from 2009 and took up lecturing in 2019.