Maria Fox

'Slick Systems' and 'Happy Hackers': experience with group projects at UCL

The authors describe their experience of group projects in the practical teaching of software engineering over a period of eight years. Their initial projects tended to be too challenging, and few groups managed to produce complete pieces of work. They have deliberately simplified tasks slightly, resulting in less frustration and better projects, so that students reap more benefits. Students learn about division of work, co-operation with others and scheduling of time. As students are required to provide assessments of other projects and of the contributions of members of their own project group, they are also encouraged to develop critical faculties. The staff effort involved in this method of teaching compares quite reasonably with traditional lectures.

A Note on Chapman`s Modal Truth Criterion

The formal statement of the Modal Truth Criterion presented by Chapman [1] is shown not to be necessary, in contradiction of Chapmans original claim that the criterion is both necessary and sufficient. This is achieved through the presentation of a counter-example which is a partial plan in which a goal is necessarily true, and yet fails to satisfy Chapmans criterion. A corollary of this result is that the validity checking problem for partial plans, claimed by Chapman to be polynomially solvable, is now open.