@buherator @inthehands If I had any faith that it wouldn’t immediately leak and alert students I’d actually break an experiment on purpose as an instructor to teach this particular lesson
@finestructure @buherator “You should do something to throw them a wrench!” is one of the most common suggestions I get from industry folks about the software project course I teach. And my response is always the same:
Have you •ever• been on a project that didn’t have spontaneous problems, surprising obstacles, sudden wrinkles? Just make sure they’re doing real work, and all the problems naturally happen on their own.
@inthehands Hah, true. These experiments were a bit different though. Sure, you sometimes encountered real problems but the setups were well maintained and by and large you'd get decent results.
What really lends itself to this kind of “broken experiment" is that you gather the data and can't tell if it's any good until you analyse it later. So you wouldn't be messing with students' data collection, “only” with their analysis.
@finestructure Fair. There’s a loose analogy to the difference between structured software assignments, carefully designed to create clean conditions where only specific problems occur, and open-ended team projects.