The TA Adventures of Lauryn and Cindy

Fall 2015 - Winter 2016

HOME || CINDY || LAURYN

We had the privilege of being teaching assistants for CSCI 10 Lab for the first and second quarters of our junior year. Despite knowing enough about C++ to help people with it, there were a lot of other things we had to learn to be good TAs as well. Here is a randomly organized list of things we learned how to do while in the process of teaching others:

Log: March 10

Should be simple conversion of C++ to C

• For that first code it would be helpful to set a variable to be -1 by default

Log: March 3

Dr. Linnell went to a conference!

• "I have no idea what I'm doing" -- Dr. Tran
• Class looked pretty overwhelmed by his Linux skills
• Lecture went on for a while since people had questions and Dr. Tran introduced many new tools

Log: February 25

Order is important

• If copying info from Linnell's website, struct must be in same order
• That matrix part is pretty easy now

Log: February 18

Can't use substring function

• Explaing how the substring function they have to create will help them find strings within a string
• Character addition is still the bomb

Log: Feb 11

What is a factorial

• Factorial function does not work for numbers 1 and 2
• It was kind of hot today and it was affecting debugging skills

Log: February 4

Scoping out scope

• Not much here, just people taking their time mapping out scope

Log: January 28

Intro to functions

• Memorizing syntax might help a lot with functions at the beginning
• Understanding what it does also helps a ton
• Instructions...

Log: January 21

Woohoo, loops again

• We have to make them think of multiple ways to solve a problem and select the best way
• Nudging people in the right direction

Log: January 14

That bio thing again

• Pretty straight forward

Log: January 7

Installing Codeblocks yet again

• The class is a lot smaller than last quarter, as expected
• We got the spacious auditorium room in Kenna

Log: December 3

Learning C in the last lab

• C++ > C
• Someone's code should have worked but was returning the wrong index of the closest letter to "a" within a word. Solved by putting { } around an if statement with a single line of code in it.
• %d, %s, whatever

Log: November 19

File i/o is still the bomb

• Grabbing the file path is so difficult in Mac
• Um, the instructions said to call the average function, but a lot of people just did the file i/o part
• In fact a lot of questions could be answered if people read the instructions
• Dr. Tran's class did not learn about !file.eof()
• An output file is made by the program, so it shouldn't need to be downloaded
• Some people are still having difficulty with using functions and using different variable names
• Trying not to tell people how to code, but sometimes all they really need help with is syntax
• "I don't want to blame the TAs, but they told me..." -- Dr. Linnell
• Why are people reading stuff in using strange conditions in the while loop... just read in a string and then do something with it
• Debugging EXC_BAD_ACCESS for the homework (Due 11/18) is slowly killing me- L

Log: November 12

What kind of name is "Slaughterhouse 5" and we are reminded of MATH 53 ( Linear Algebra)

• The structure part was pretty easy
• Lauryn and I still don't like matrices, but this was a pretty cool way to think of them
• A lot of people didn't get to part B (after the first structure)

Log: November 5

What is substring

• Should probably state that the substring function must not be used
• Kind of hard to explain how to do this if people don't know what substring does
• Difficult to explain how to loop back around the alphabet when doing the shift cipher part

Log: October 29

Spanish arrays

• I think being TAs is wearing us out or something. We're losing our debugging power
• Stamps were a great idea, GO CINDY!
• People seem to like the cute Hello Kitty stamps

Log: October 22

Scope and writing functions

• That scope stuff takes forever
• Why is debugging always difficult
• Is there a way to make lab report instructions bolder than bold
• Bringing ink stamps next time so Lauryn's wrist doesn't hurt so much

Log: October 15

Double loops, random numbers, boolean functions, and all that good stuff

• Lauryn was in Texas for Grace Hopper today :c
• Learn how to make up examples on the spot
• How to simplify overly complicated code
• Do people not know what "implementation" means?
• We should think of more analogies to use in order to explain how stuff works

Log: October 8

Applying physics to computer science

• There is an optimal way to code for a problem
• We need to practice skimming code and finding a problem in five seconds
• Omg TA office hours

Log: October 1

In case you didn't remember biology

• Boolean stuff is as confusing as we remembered
• How to put if/else statements all over the place
• Does it help to smile more?
• Must remember to look at both people in pairs when answering their questions
• Would it be okay to bring stickers? They'll probably take longer to apply then initialing papers, but if someone finishes a lab, maybe they can get one on their sheet. Idk, just trying to think of ways to get rid of them.
• Discovered how uncomplicated things could become complicated
• There must be a better way to explain cin and cout
• Why do people keep asking what to put in the lab report? Aren't the instructions clear? It's literally just copy and paste

Log: September 24

First day on the job!

• Teach people how to install software that we somehow installed with no trouble last year and couldn't do the same today
• Understand questions
• Understand how to answer said questions
• What are these symbols called: < >
• Join the war between CodeBlocks, XCode, and Qt
• QT sucks, Choosing the color for the Widgets on QT is the the only good part
• Windows > Macs
• Mac > Windows .... jk they are both good