Student Grouping
To form effective groups, we have considered your survey answers and tried to mix up the participants to make sure the groups have a good diversity of skills and that they are fairly similar to each other. There has been some scientific research on this topic that we have relied upon to make this assignment.
For current class, we formed groups of students by tabu meta-heuristic search [2] with the objective of "maximally diverse group" [1] borrowing the ideas from the following two papers.
2. Assigning Students to Groups Using General and Context-Specific Criteria Links to an external site..
The criteria of diversity is based on self-exposed strength and weaknesses by students. The student expectation survey data has provided us with two kinds of skills: subjects and personality. The subjects criteria are: Programming, Math, Algorithm and Biology. The personality criteria are: Leadership, Hard work, Able to work with others, Deliver on time, Adapt to changing requirements/environment, Thorough/detail oriented. The assignment of students has been done in way to increase the diversity of skills represented - each group contains, for example, students with both low and high leadership skills, students with low and high knowledge of biology, etc. Such diverse groups are beneficial as they provide students a chance to learn from each other.
The grouping result is here: grouping.xlsx