Teaching and Evaluating Collaborative Group Work in Large Visualization Courses

The growing number of students can be a challenge for teaching visualization lectures, supervision, evaluation, and grading. Moreover, designing a visualization course, matching the different experiences and skills of the students is one major goal in order to find a common solvable task for all of the students. However, the given task is important to follow a common goal, to collaborate in small project groups, but also to further experience, learn, or extend programming skills. In this paper we describe an approach to manage a large number of 272 students in a design-based active learning course who were relatively unexperienced first year bachelor students with a wide range of programming skills. We explain different subsequent stages to successfully handle the upcoming problems and describe how many and to which extent supervisors are involved in the development of the project. The project task description is given in a way that it has a minimal number of requirements but can be extended in many directions while most of the decisions are up to the students like programming languages, visualization approaches, or interaction techniques. Finally, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of our teaching strategy.