5 Years Of Teaching C++: A Retrospective
summary
Five years of running a university C++ course turned into concrete rules and failures: weekly auto-graded homeworks (target 1–4 h) later collapsed into larger 12–16 h tasks, a semester project with CI (~30 h) that only two students actually used and cost ~2+ h to grade each, and a move to pen-and-paper reading-heavy exam that worked better than expected. Tools: Catch2 tests, sanitizers, CMake, GitLab, VM image. Scaling to 120 novices adds ~25% more student time and grading pain.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Five years teaching C++
- 1:50Why teach C++ differently
- 5:22Course structure expectations
- 10:41Homework design challenges
- 17:45Accreditation changes
- 22:08Student attendance strategies
- 27:45Weekly vs large homework
- 31:37Pen-and-paper C++ exams
- 33:47Semester grading consistency
- 38:47Threading homework feedback
- 44:41Advice for C++ educators
- 48:11Data to improve courses
- 50:17Detecting plagiarism
- 52:27Workload expectations
- 56:43Q&A
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