Hardware Description and Verification

Mid-course feedback 2011

As part of the standard course evaluation routine, a mid-course feedback meeting was held on 2011-05-05. Attending the meeting:

• Student representative: Nicklas Persson
• Teachers: Mary Sheeran and Emil Axelsson

Absent due to illness:

• Student representative: Ali Alavi

Discussion topics

• Nicklas brought some input after discussion with class mates. The only negative point was the fact that students did not get feedback on their PSL lab in time to be able to change their way of working on the PSL take home exam. (This referred mainly to the feedback about not including internal signals in PSL properties.) We agreed that this can be solved for the PSL part (next year) by 1) some course reorganisation to make a gap between the end of the lab and the start of the take home exam and 2) inclusion of concrete examples and practical tips both in the guidelines for verification and in a more practically oriented PSL lecture. For the Lava part, Mary later took account of the input and worked to mark the Lava labs as quickly as possible.
• Positive comments were received about the availability of useful documents (on Schedule and Links pages), for example the PSL manual and the Lava tutorial.
• We spent most of the meeting on discussing additional questions for inclusion in the course questionnaire. We strongly encourage all students to fill in this questionnaire, which will be available from May 30.
• We discussed the possibility of presenting masters thesis projects to the students on the course. This would be a good idea but is not going to happen this year (as lab marking and exam preparation had to be prioritised more highly). We will try to put up a list of such projects on the course page once the exam marking is complete. Students interested in masters projects related to the course (or to functional programming) should contact Mary or Emil.

Next meeting

• The next meeting will take place about half way through the first reading period of the academic year 2011/2012. Students are encouraged to give their opinions and suggestions to the course representatives.