Scribble

Strategies

• Ask them to draw a picture of the starting state and the final state.

  • Reason: Separate figuring out "what to do" from "how to do it"
  • Make sure they can:
    • relate variables to the picture
    • do a toy example by hand, entirely justified by the picture
  • They may need guiding for intermediate states
    • empirically, going backwards easier than going forwards
    • simplify the problem, get them to figure out what they need
    • reaction pathways, really..
  • especially useful for: C0VM, malloc, collect

• Come up with systematic approaches and encourage their use.

  • Reason: If people are stuck on a problem, either 1. they don't have the right tool or 2. they're not applying the tool correctly. This addresses the former, helping the latter should be easy.
  • e.g. 122 style proofs encourage you
    1. write down what assumptions you're starting from
    2. write down what you want to prove
    3. write down any useful equivalences
  • e.g. 150 structural induction problems generally solvable by
    1. step
    2. reverse step
    3. IH
    4. lemma
    5. invent lemma (almost never a good idea to mention this one...)
  • e.g. tracing 150 CPS
    • substitute every continuation with s0 s1 ... and you find that they look the same
    • like built-in error checking, patterns will guide your work

• Make sure they understand what they're required to do for credit.

  • Credit: 122 internal TA training
  • Reason: Amazingly, people do not know what they are required to do for credit.
  • I've had people who were stuck on optional things for hours.. without realizing it was optional.

• Always end with "explain in your own words back to me" before leaving someone at OH.

  • Reason: Most people don't take good notes as they're getting help. Make sure they know what to do after you go and have a logical sequence of steps in mind.
  • Plus they feel like they learned something this way.
  • Bonus points if you can make it sound like they were there all along, just missing tiny steps.
    • Need to build up their confidence wherever possible to prevent the "frozen in OH" where they stare into space until a TA gets there. They should keep trying.

Motivators

• Learn to draw analogies to Python.

  • Reason: Most people "know" Python, more likely to pay attention, concepts often transfer
  • range/generators: lazy programming, concurrency
  • list comprehensions: map + filter, powerful!! readable!!
  • Fun stuff to make them feel special and all
    • C0VM: dis.dis

• Functional programming in general

  • Don't tell computer what to do, tell computer what you want
  • No side-effects = no jumping around a codebase to figure out how a function works
  • Particularly well suited to transforming data

Personal Anti-tilt

• Two-strike rule for RTFM responses, after which leave their Piazza post alone
• Distinguish between people there for homework help, and people there to learn

Misc

• 251 reductions: draw a table. List the variables of problem A on the left, and problem B on the right. Then you just need to connect arrows.

i'm free! time to stop for now