Week 10 Teaching activities

To cap off this quarter, you’ll administer short teaching activities in sections of introductory classes.

Logistics

You’ll work in your culminating experience groups.

Each slot will be roughly 25 minutes long, in a lecture section of CSC 101, 202, or 203 in week 10. Details about dates, times, and rooms are in the sign-up sheet (will be released soon).

Topics

You can choose from the following 203 topics:

• Exceptions and exception handling in Java
• Java generics
• Records in Java

If you’re doing a 101 or 202 session, we will figure out topics on a case-by-case basis. In previous years, folks have done:

• In CSC 101
  • Insertion sort or some other sorting algorithm
  • Choosing good software test cases
• In CSC 202
  • Spatial data structures like the KD Tree and the PR Quadtree

Topics can be repeated as long as the same topic is not taught to the same group of students more than once. You don’t need to be limited to the topics above, but I list them because I have some ideas/materials for those topics, so it may help reduce your workload.

We will discuss these topics in class, so don’t worry if you think you need a refresher on these materials.

Style of the activity

Since you only have 25 minutes, the examples/activities will be quite short. Depending on the topic, you may need to do some explanation of background information before distributing a hands-on activity. But I envision this not taking too long.

So your primary job will be to walk around and answer questions in the lecture or lab.

Assessment

You’ll be assessed based on:

• Preparedness (based on an individual group meeting we will have before your workshop).
• A short reflection response (see below) submitted after your activity. The response will be submitted individually, not as a group.
• Feedback from the students you teach. Again, you won’t be graded based on the content of these responses. You’ll get a grade as long as I get some feedback responses and there’s nothing egregious in there.

Deliverable

After your teaching activity, please reflect on the following questions and respond in Canvas. This is an individual submission.

• What went well?
• What did not go as well as you’d have liked? What would you do differently the second time around?
• Compare and contrast this teaching experience with your tutoring experience (and/or your workshop if you did one). What were some differences and similarities between the experiences?
  • This can be in terms of the actual teaching method (1-on-1 tutoring vs. group instruction), the students and their prior knowledge and motivation to learn the content, your expertise in the material, etc.